Project Vision 21

Recently, I decided to purchase a new version of a software program that I have been using on my computer for years. After completing the payment, I downloaded the new version, but when I tried to install it, I received a warning message informing me that the program contained a virus. I contacted the software company's customer support service, and the explanation they gave me left me thinking.

According to their explanation, because the new version of the program was so recent, antivirus systems did not yet recognize it and therefore identified it as a "virus" and blocked its installation. They also explained that once a certain number of people purchased and installed the updated version, the program would be recognized and accepted by antivirus systems.

And that is exactly what happened. A few hours later, when I tried once again to install the program, there was no virus warning, and the installation was completed successfully within minutes. Because I am unfamiliar with the technology behind these systems, I cannot judge whether it is true that the "viruses" disappeared simply because more people purchased the software. Perhaps that is indeed how it works.

Be that as it may, the experience led me to think that, in real life, whenever new ideas emerge, society often treats them as something akin to a "virus," or at least as something dangerous, and rejects them, either directly or through various kinds of "warnings" that discourage or restrict their use and acceptance.

Throughout history, numerous thinkers, creators, and inventors paid with their lives or suffered serious consequences for daring to propose new ideas that the dominant society of their time firmly rejected. Yet, as time passed, more and more people began to accept those same ideas, which eventually came to be regarded as normal.

This raises an important question: Is truth merely whatever the majority of people, or at least a sufficiently large number of them, consider to be true? Bringing the question into the context of our own time, we might ask: Is truth simply whatever algorithms become accustomed to seeing as normal and therefore stop rejecting?

If that were the case, truth would seem to become something entirely relative, arbitrary, or utilitarian, lacking any ontologically independent existence and certainly any absolute character. And in our time, an additional element has emerged: the decision about which ideas should be "cleansed" of viruses no longer belongs to human beings but increasingly to algorithms.

Thus, the simple installation of a new program on my computer unexpectedly became a reflection on what truth is and what we mean when we use the word "truth"—two intertwined questions, but not identical ones. After all, the mere fact that certain ideas are accepted by a particular group of people does not make them true.

And if we are willing to consider only those ideas that have already been accepted, what space remains for dialogue or for change? Ultimately, under such conditions, what kind of science, politics, or religion would we have? Perhaps we are already accepting contaminated ideas without even realizing it.