Project Vision 21

With some frequency, both in direct conversations and through social networks, I hear or read people who are looking for a guru, or reference, or influencer who provides them with answers and solutions for the problems that these people face in their lives in the context of an increasingly chaotic, complex, and unpredictable world.

What catches my attention is not only the increasing frequency with which these requests are expressed but, at the same time, what is being sought is not someone who facilitates a dialogue, both internal and external, in order to find the answers that are desperately sought. , but rather they want to receive those answers directly, delegating that responsibility to the “referent”.

In other words (and unduly simplifying and generalizing), there is no desire for dialogue but rather a one-way monologue is expected in which the unquestionable “wise man” expresses his “wisdom” with such authority and charisma so that this “wisdom” can be accepted uncritically. This uncritical acceptance of charismatic authoritarians is extremely dangerous.

The situation is not new, but it seems to have worsened in a global sociocultural context in which the known world is fragmenting and blurring day after day before our very eyes to be replaced by something still too diffuse to understand, similar (but in real life real) to the fictitious Chinese encyclopedia “Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” mentioned by Borges in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (1952).

In his preface to The Order of Things (1970, xv), Foucault, after explaining that the origin of his book is precisely the aforementioned Borges passage, adds that Borges captures how disturbed we now are “by the collapse of the millennia-old distinction between the Same and the Other” and, as a consequence, by “the limitations of our own system of thought.”

But already in 1784, in his booklet What is Enlightenment, Kant lamented the “laziness and cowardice” of those people who “will gladly remain in immaturity throughout their lives” because “it is very easy for them to be immature.”

As Kant says, these are people who replace their own consciousness and understanding with something external (a book, a pastor, a doctor). In our time we must add an influencer, a video, a post. 

As Kant explains, in the presence of a “benevolent guardian,” many prefer (we prefer) that that person take charge and be responsible for the “tedious work” of having to think for oneself. The result, this philosopher states, is to stop being human (that is, being responsible for our own lives) to transform ourselves into “docile” and “domesticated creatures.”

But to think for ourselves we must have the freedom to think, a freedom that had already been strongly restricted in Kant's time and that in our time is restricted by replacing "think" with "calculate" and "calculate" with the possibility of choosing between certain predetermined options.

I know very well that this mostly incoherent babbling contributes little and nothing to one's own thinking, but clearly understanding it, we still wanted to express it.