Project Vision 21

We already returned to the cave, too fast and too confident that this was the only and best option. Or, if you prefer, we returned to Egypt because we prefer what is already known (even if it was bad) to the responsibility of building our own future. The hope for a virus to teach us something about ourselves was short-lived. Neither viruses nor gods can do it.

We left the cave (we call it "normal life") for just a few moments and the sun blinded us, but instead of waiting for our eyes to get used to the new light and for our minds to reevaluate the old reality, we ran back to the shadows that, although illusory, are the shadows that we have always known.

For a moment, the illusion cracked, but before it completely collapsed. we fell into the worst illusion of all, to believe that we had overcome the illusion. We force ourselves to believe, with the deepest self-deception, that the best thing was "to return to normality", even if that "normality" was a life in chains looking at shadows on a screen.

We went out into the desert and when we saw no roads (or food) we returned to the known roads, where slavery guarantees that, as slaves, they will feed us (but only, obviously, to a certain extent.)

We were so seduced by the security and stability of slavery (in Greek, “doulos” means both “slave” and “employee”) that prevented us from assuming our individual and collective freedom to march to a promised future, where there are no roads, there are no guarantees, and there are many enemies. 

We prefer to be part of somebody else’s future instead of being part of our own future. 

The stupefying screen was stronger than the bright sun. The image of the pharaoh on duty was more than the impulse to allow our own being to be born. The message of returning to normality (that is, perpetuating the past) caught us as the siren's song would. In fact, we were captivated in every sense of the word: we are held captive by our own captivity.

The sun shone, the sea split, thunder spoke, and the future summoned us. But we, childish, narcissistic adults with closed minds, prefer darkness, closed-mindlessness, anti-dialogue, and existential failure to opening our mind, heart, spirit, and will to our own multidimensionality.

For a moment, for just an instant, a virus (or the divinity, or the Universe, or all of them together) showed us a butterfly and we caterpillars did not see ourselves in the butterfly. We didn't recognize ourselves. We didn’t know that the butterfly was ourselves. The quarantine locked us in a small world, so small that it gave us no escape.

The cocoon is also a form of confinement, but the chrysalis is not there to go back to the past, but to transform its body and mind for a new future. Others in other places will fly. We, Kundera said, are still beginners.