When Hope Becomes Action
Our ancient stories provided comfort and belonging in times of darkness, but were ultimately disempowering, outsourcing our wellbeing to hope. Eventually, we developed tools to demystify the world and manifest our dreams.
There was a time when fantasy — those magical ideas that fill the minds of wide-eyed children and raw-hearted adults alike — exhilarated me. Gods and religion, sorcerers and dragons, soulmates and happily-ever-after, aliens and superheroes, good and evil… they tapped into a deep-seated human predilection I shared with so many others for big dreams. I always kept that door cracked open just enough to allow myself to ask:
“What if?”
It has taken millennia for mankind to evolve enough meta-cognition to understand that we don’t know any more than we know, and accordingly, to develop the tools and methodologies that allow us to reduce the gap between knowledge and the collective imaginations of our lore.
Science is the lay equivalent of the biblical expulsion from the Garden of Eden: before Eve bit the apple, she didn’t know she was naked, but now that she did, she was mortified. Similarly, before the scientific revolution, we didn’t realize that rain didn’t come…
