Sooo, you wanna know what I learned this week?
Honestly a lot but one thought really stuck with me. Walk with me here.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: “Is it worth it?” Not worth in an economic sense, not even in a personal sense, but in a global sense – a crazy thought, I know.
But imagine. Just imagine for a moment. Use the brightest, most extravagant colors your mind can produce and picture what the world could look like if we made this question the foundation of our way of life. Isn’t that what we all strive for? If we let this question guide every decision, how could any decision go fundamentally wrong?
Of course, it would create countless decisions – far too many for any of us to handle. But the question itself is not the work. It’s the spark. The guiding idea. The real task is to build a world in which this question is the frame, not the burden. And it frustrates me endlessly that such a thought is considered unthinkable, no matter which canvas you paint it on. Because how can it be unthinkable? We built computers from numbers we invented – abstract symbols we collectively agreed to believe in. We constructed digital worlds, networks of data, knowledge, and languages most of us do not even understand. We created self-learning intelligence. We built structures so complex they generate their own thoughts.
We connected the planet through technology, information, infrastructure, culture.
Yet imagining a shared global thought – a coordinated “we” – is supposedly impossible?
How does that make sense?
We can build machines that process billions of operations per second, but we cannot build trust. We can create algorithms that learn from chaos, but we cannot create a political system that learns from mistakes. We can simulate universes, but we cannot imagine a common future.
How can the species that put machines on Mars not figure out how to cooperate on Earth? It is absurd. How have scientists not analyzed this?
But maybe they tried. But maybe the problem is that every attempt to say something essential expands into something so large that it ends up saying nothing. We drown in theories – globalization, multilateralism, geopolitics, fossil capitalism, ecological collapse – but none of them capture the simple, paralyzing feeling of “and now what?” I think we all got it by now that we are not heading into a great direction, but can finally someone kick us in the butt and tell us where else to go?
But the problem is we don’t have a US that includes everybody that we need (which, shockingly, is everybody) that we can address. Yet the us is causing the problems. Maybe the us is all involved in little problems adding to the big, so we are a bit caught up in it. How do we change it? Can we build an us that can change it? Where are the Illuminati when you need them?
Look around the world and you have right-wing parties popping up like mushrooms, and of course our reaction is to condemn them for their nationalist approach because we learned it’s not leading us anywhere. But what we have forgotten to learn is to talk about the cause of right-wing parties or nationalist rise. It’s being overwhelmed with the world. It’s the same reaction as a child being frustrated. It throws the toy away and cries. It’s not a very useful reaction, but it’s a valid one. And we should have learned that ignoring the cause and pushing these people into a corner and handling them with some supremacy, like we know the answers to the problems (and I mean the real problems, not the imagined ones caused by lack of feeling of community). What we have lost is the power of imagination, connected imagination that builds community and solutions, not more problems and division.
I think that these little problems that are so tangible for us on the personal level only transport to the biggest level of economics and problems. The core of the problem is that we can only fully control and understand our own little vessel, and we build structures to bring others into our community, some more successfully than others. We build words to connect us to them. Globalization has been maybe one of the biggest stories of an us we had. But again, the vessel didn’t include all, and those outside challenged it. And both didn’t see the impact it brought to the only real US that we have – the planet. And what do we do after we were all made aware of the problem? Build a new, better way of an us? Of course not; we retaliated to the little us that we feel comfortable in. All over the continent that spreads to different levels (even just in Europe you can see the vessel of the EU, built on the idea of a bigger us, crumbling under this change – each state clinging to different vessels), mixed with strong personalities and levels of power, we are left with the mess in front of us – with individuals pretending their explanation of a bigger vessel includes the maximum it can.
And we have given up in this position. Even I, writing this, stopped after this sentence and thought: “Maybe that is the maximum.” Maybe we can’t find that us.
And then I thought: What would be the basis of that us? What would our things be that we can all agree on, that we need? And I mean the basis, because once we are faced with difficulties we all very clearly see what our basis is – food, family, sense of belonging, and sense of self – we all feel like we would lose that by thinking globally. The point is we would all need to accept the different forms of that basis and build the frame in which all forms can prosper without minimizing the others. And I think we could do that. If we step back and look into all our structures and ask the question: “Is it worth it?”
And the thing is we can’t all do this. Not every person wants to. They want their basis and not to be messed with that. And that is valid and fair. But we need to find a way that politics gets back to that question and thinks globally. Find a way to give these people the tools to build these structures without lifting the problems of the small entity to the top. In history we have tried this multiple times. I think it’s time to try again.