Project Vision 21

I must confess that the beginning of the message left me confused: “Your lifetime subscription is about to expire.” If I activated a subscription (with a certain company) trusting that it truly was “for life,” how is it possible that, without prior notice or any alternative offer, the company can so brazenly cancel it?

Clearly, we live in an era in which words no longer mean anything—or almost nothing. They have been reduced to mere and superficial tools of emotional manipulation (not even intellectual manipulation, because we no longer think), with no reference whatsoever to any presumed past, present, or future reality. Today’s words, far from illuminating reality, conceal it.

Far away—perhaps centuries or millennia behind us—seem to be those times when the word was creative, from the famous “God said…” to “In the beginning was the deed,” as Goethe suggested translating “word” in the well-known opening of the book attributed to John. But this is not merely about biblical references. Consider, for example, the Greek concept of logos.

Someone might object, and rightly so, that a nostalgic, pseudo-theological-philosophical approach does little or nothing to address the challenge of determining whether any meaning remains in our words (and, consequently, in our lives) or whether, on the contrary, the crisis of meaning has already swept away the few hopes that remained for genuine dialogue.

For that reason, I hasten to acknowledge the limits of what I share here. And I am not referring to the 500-word limit to which we have confined these columns for more than 20 years, but to the very limits of my knowledge and thinking even to begin to approach the subject. But be that as it may, at least for the moment, we are still here in this world.

At the same time—though not to excuse my limitations—I cannot fail to mention that suffocating technoscience and a dehumanizing global system make any dialogue about dialogue and any thinking about thinking increasingly difficult tasks, not only because of the inherent challenges of such undertakings (as Socrates exemplifies), but because of the lack of interlocutors.

I do not intend to seek out a dark, cold, forgotten corner in some remote cave to shut myself away and isolate myself from the world. After all, wherever I may be, there will be my world. Nor do I propose returning to the past or trying to recreate it in the present. But when the horizon of the future narrows, I cannot help but feel concerned—existentially speaking.

It is clear that we are living not merely in a time of change or transformation, but above all in a time of collapse, comparable only (in my view, after having studied the subject) to the collapse of the Bronze Age 3,200 years ago. In fact, perhaps we ourselves are the true collapse of the Bronze Age, three millennia later.

In short, what once was “for life” now comes with a near expiration date.