The current crisis is profound, touching our formative landscape and making us question the way we have learned to see everything. What we imagined the future to be is melting before our own eyes, like icebergs in the Arctic. All that we thought we knew is in doubt, including our belief in world domination by the West. The ultimate question now is not if, but when, the White-West will collapse. When will the next Berlin Wall fall? The news coming from the U.K. certainly points in this direction. Even the tech industry is in crisis; they like to appear future-focused but in reality have adapted centralized, monolithic structures straight out of the 19th century that are tripping them up. The violent 1% are manipulating science and information, destroying everything on their path as they seek greater power — their relationships with others, their own businesses, and their environment.
The media and the system want to sell us an “Apocalypse Now” reality: they justify their wars and rising military expenses by pouring oil onto fire in conflicting regions, while at the same time feeding our addictions to money, alcohol, drugs, and sex, to better help us cope with this alienating reality. We have become disconnected from ourselves and from others and instead connected to our smartphones, computers, and social media. To whom are we talking? And is anybody really listening?
We are in rehab right now, trying to get over decades, if not centuries, of addiction and depression. Our bodies are sweating with fever, trying to get through the detox but not yet capable of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We have been so dehumanized that we don’t even know how to love ourselves anymore. How do we re-learn to be with others, just as friends? How do we learn from our own experiences and not get taken by illusory, short-term distractions? At heart, the issue is with our own internal registers. People are getting more affected by their outside, media-fed (imaginary) environment than by their own concrete experiences. Why are we more guided by what we are told is going on around us than by what we register ourselves? When and why did we decide to forfeit our intention, our love for our common humanity, and our faith in the future for a short-lived “shot of happiness”?
For those who are able to perceive it, the humanization of the world is in full-scale process. This process is cleaning everything, opening closets, ripping off lids, pushing us to look under the beds and throwing out worn-down clothes. Our very own self is coming into question, from gender identity to money, work, interpersonal relationships, and happiness, redefining before our eyes what it means to be human. Social dissent is emerging all over, from Santiago to Delhi to New York, from student protests to farmers’ strikes to the Great Resignation, where 47 million Americans quit their jobs in one year. Cultures are talking to one another like never before; our “big blue” is finally one and multipolar and there is no going back to a unipolar White-West. Science is breaking boundaries every day, climate awareness is going full force, and alternative energy is recognized as the future (there is no more question about it). Transportation in cities is changing drastically: public transit, walking, bicycles, scooters, and so on are taking over our streets, replacing polluting cars. New business models are transforming work, and thanks to advances in network technology access to knowledge is becoming universal. Antiquated political structures are falling and we are no longer caught in the ideological class struggle of the previous century. People are standing against an oppressive and violent system and countries are taking back control of their own resources and economies. Yes, we are doing it as we speak: humanizing the world.
Don’t listen to what a few people are saying; remember that talk is cheap. Look instead at what people are doing, producing demonstration effect after demonstration effect. The majority of people from left to right want the world to change and many, many are changing it every day. We will not, however, see them in our mainstream media or on our “de”-social network platforms. We must look deeper, and connect instead to that evolutionary direction that has guided the human race, through twists and turns, across hundreds of thousands of years. As Javier Tolcachier writes in latest article, Latin American-Caribbean unity: When, if not now?:
“There are occasions in history that must be seized. They are windows of opportunity that indicate that the time to move forward decisively has come. Indecision in such circumstances is inadvisable and even reprehensible.”
Let’s not misrepresent the signs that are appearing, and lose the opportunity of producing a qualitative leap in our human process.
