Humanity is Beautiful

We now visibly witness the world seemingly crumbling before our eyes. We hear alarm bell after alarm bell after alarm bell. We watch in terror as the Doomsday Clock ticks down to midnight.

Where Exxon Valdez and other oil spills demonstrated the false “Progress” of our energy systems, the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the false “Progress” of our financial systems.

For those in the early-to-mid 20th Century, these fossil fuels must have appeared as a gift from God. In 1989, that rosy outlook changed forever. 

At the turn of the decade in 1960, some in the United States desperately clung to the old ways. But more than ever, the new generation was calling in, even insisting on, a new way.

For centuries, humans in the West had been galvanized around the concepts of liberty and reason. For many, The Great War proved this spirit of humanity and progress a farce.

The monumental changes of The Enlightenment were about more than liberty and justice. For many, in myriad ways, day-to-day life was getting vastly easier and safer as the technologies and knowledge at our disposal grew and grew.

Baruch Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, Voltaire, and many others wrote some of the early chapters of The Story of Progress.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century C.E., the Western world fell into what many Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers – and many people to this day – pejoratively referred to as the “Dark Ages.”

We are the ones who will create Heaven from this Hell we sprouted from.

The only way forward is to finally accept how truly ugly, reckless, and depraved we have become and to return to how we were before when we were wise, good, and whole. This is one of our favorite stories about ourselves today.