Light a torch, dark times ahead
Most societies that have fallen before ours, have went through a similar pattern of rise, prosper and fall. Ours is no exception. Towards the end of their prosperous phase, brought about by discovering some rational rules on how things work (science) and developing an ability to exploit those observations (technology), societies tended to hit limits of all kinds, only to find themselves unwillingly embarking on their journey down.
One of the many limits is the limit to human rationality. We, modern humans, tend to think of ourselves as highly rational beings. We take pride in building systems based on scientific discoveries and manage them based on facts and figures — a method enabling further discoveries and ever newer innovations. The early successes of this approach led us to think: ‘hey, this could go on indefinitely!’ or ‘there is no limit to human ingenuity!’
Scientific progress has not only become the norm, but an outright expectation: that every ‘problem’ besetting humanity from climate change to hunger can and will be ‘solved’. We have lured ourselves into believing that since scientific discoveries and reason have brought us to our present state we could continue innovate our way out every situation.
This idea of infinite progress made us thinking in linear terms, where people imagine a straight line with a starting point back in the dark (dumb, stupid, aggressive etc) times of the stone age, with all its superstitions and ‘false beliefs’, swooshing all the way through history towards the shining victory of reason and knowledge — pointing eventually into infinity, and beyond.
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