Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

For a long time (too long, in fact) and at a different time of my life, I thought I was the “owner” of the truth. I do not believe it anymore. Later, I thought that perhaps I was just renting the truth (to paraphrase Anthony de Mello.) I don’t believe that either. After all, we are living in a post-modern, post-truth society. So, what we should do?

I don’t know what we should do. However, I think it will be important to learn how to keep in the past old patterns of thinking and acting that are now inoperative. They have become useless for the present and they won’t work in the future. There is nothing wrong with those old patterns and models. They are just inadequate for the new context.

When you are a child, you dress, think, and act as a child. Later in your life, you live the “child” things behind. In our case, the immaturity of the global culture is forcing us, so it seems, to leave behind ideas and beliefs we deemed immutable and irreplaceable. I am not talking about yielding to the new reality, but about not losing our minds.

For example, when I was in my native Buenos Aires, I drove my car in a certain way. However, I won’t last more than a few minutes on the streets of Denver, Colorado, if I keep driving in the way I did in Buenos Aires. And I will never driver in Buenos Aires as I drive now in Denver.

In other words, just because a certain way of thinking and acting was useful for a certain context and time, it doesn’t mean that same pattern of thinking and acting will work in all circumstances and places. And, of course, we can’t assume that’s the only way or, even worst, the only “true” way of doing things.

Clinching to an old way of thinking and acting just because those patterns worked for us in the past is as ridiculous as refusing to leave behind some of the ideas and thoughts we had when we were children. Yet, that’s exactly what some leaders are inviting us to do: going back to the past and remain there.

Seeking refuge in the past (which, by the way, is no longer there) seems to me, in my opinion, a defense mechanism to deal with a deeply complex present and an unimaginable future. And it is not a good strategy to solve neither current nor future problems.

We are facing a new reality, totally unthinkable just a few years ago, where Artificial Intelligence, globalization, and post-modernity (including trans-humanism) are challenging and transforming into illusion everything we thought we knew. Of course, we can remain faithful to our illusions, as many did throughout human history.

As for me, this year my goal is to learn something that up to this point I have not been able to learn: what to let go so I become what I should and could be.