If we watch the news or listen in on day-to-day conversations, we might get the impression that we are done. After climate change, a universal pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a threat of nuclear attack, and so on, there seems to be a sense that humanity is at the point of extinction. Nothing is farther from the truth.
We have no idea what human beings are capable of.
Look at this chart showing the population growth over the past 200 years. In just two centuries, we went from 1 to 7 billion inhabitants without any planning. The UN estimates that around 385,000 babies are born each day around the world (140 million a year). This is like adding a large-sized country to the planet every year. Yet there are no news crews filming these births, and so we do not stop to think about the aspirations of these newborns, or wonder how they will shape the future of humanity.
Instead the news focuses our attention on prehistorical concepts like the health of the market, Darwinism, wars, oil prices, critical race theory, and class struggle. If we could stop for a minute, and put aside our theories, our policies, our laws, and all these abstract concepts that are million years away from human experience, we might instead reflect on this incredible development of the past two hundred years.
What is it that moves the human being forward, that inspires our capacity to create, our desire to transform and shape our own living conditions? Where does this profound intention come from, and where is it going?
Everything has to do with our self-consciousness, our self-wakening, our self-transcendence in our fight to overcome and transform our own conditions (personal, social, natural, physical and spiritual). We are our own limits and therefore we are our own finitude. This humanization process is unstoppable, science and ongoing discoveries push us every day to a new future, transforming our lives and transforming ourselves as human beings.
We are human beings and everything else is just simple theories that will fade out coming tomorrow.
