“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’”
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
We have never understood our potential. We have swung between thinking we are capable of anything and of nothing as we have discovered more about our world and our place within it. I think a bird’s view of our evolving understanding might encourage us to adopt a more humble perspective. New discoveries change what we are capable of, showing new horizons to what we might achieve. Recognition of newfound potential prompts cultural adaptation to reach new heights. This begs an obvious question: what if we’re wrong again? What if underestimating our potential keeps us now from progressing toward it?
Among life’s countless experiments, evolution endowed our species with a unique ability to discover knowledge of our environment. Our success has been a process of behavioral adaption to knowledge that enables us to exist in greater alignment with the order of our world.
Our ability to understand is unique because we are able to think together. Individually we are curious, each capable of unique explanations for why things are as we find them and ideas about how they could be better. Collectively we are brilliant. Our ability to communicate enables minds separated by space and time to collaboratively evolve explanations into more accurate ones. This network allows us to create better explanations that make possible a present better than our less knowledgeable ancestors could dream and informs our dreaming about a future hopefully far bleaker than our children will ever experience. Our species has collectively evolved increasingly useful discoveries of nature’s secrets and culturally adapted to more harmoniously coexist with a more known nature.
If this is right, our potential for increasing the harmony of our existence is infinite. We have discovered knowledge that allows more of our curious minds to wonder, to learn, and to contribute unique and informed ideas that progress our collective understanding. Each additional mind engaged in our species’ collective search for better explanations exponentially increases the power of our network to find them. By continually adapting to knowledge that allows more minds to engage in our networked search, we can make the growth of our discovering potential endlessly self-perpetuating.
“We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear;
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.”
Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth
What if the theists and atheists are both wrong? What if we are neither granted divine meaning for our short lives nor confined to meaninglessness in them? I think we have the opportunity to create meaning with our lives by contributing our unique minds to making our unique species’ discovering infinite instead of fleeting.
Achieving our potential will require changing how we see ourselves. The traits that enable our peaceful cohabitation disable our effective collaboration. We divide ourselves within our unified flight from ignorance. We allow the ingrained search for individual meaning to distract ourselves from our shared search for collective betterment. We allow the isolating demands of individualism to deaden our sense of humanity.
I think we might look to ancient wisdom to chart our course forward. We must know ourselves with more clarity before we can achieve our collective potential. By knowing ourselves we can understand both the source of our infinite potential and the self-imposed limitations that leave us with finite power.
Our history has been an uneven expansion of the freedom of human minds to wonder, to learn the ideas of others, and to contribute their own unique ideas. I suspect there is something of a penduluming effect of new discoveries at play here. We seek humbly in eras of acknowledged ignorance and assume ourselves all-knowing in times of modest progress. We swing back again with newfound humility faced with glaring gaps in the collective knowledge of our universe.
The knowledge we have today remains the product of a privileged minority. The cognitive diversity of our species powers our progression toward a more harmonious existence. We now know how to free the diverse living intelligence of humanity to engage with and build upon the cumulative intelligence of our ancestors. We fail to invest the time and resources (a reinvestment of the knowledge that has provided us each) to bring billions of our kin into the human mind-meld spanning continents and millennia. We subject them to the ignorance of our ancestors, robbing them of the opportunity to create meaning in their lives and all of us of their unique contributions.
This is not merely an argument for considering all of the “lost Einsteins.” It is a recognition that the revolutionary ideas that came from prominent thinkers were actually evolutionary ones. Newton famously thanked the giants on whose shoulders he stood for his vision. Without the evolutionary ideas of successive thinkers before them, the Einsteins and Newtons and Darwins to whom we attribute such greatness would have lacked the foundational knowledge from which to synthesize their revolutionary ideas. We now have the tools to engage 7+ billion minds with the ideas of our ancestors, that they might use their unique minds to create ideas useful for solving the challenges of today and creating the better world of tomorrow.
“Creative work is not a selfish act… It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
In the course of our collective wondering we have wandered from ecological insignificance to planetary dominance, forming a global society unified in all but name and sustained only by an unsustainable plundering of our home’s resources. We know of one planet on which life has ever existed, and one creature amongst life’s untold offshoots intelligent and self-aware enough to both consider its own existence and consciously contribute to its own eradication.
We are unique, and have the chance to be special. We have the potential to grow our discovering power infinitely and embark on an endless journey toward more harmoniously coexisting within a more understood universe. We alone have the potential to redefine our trajectory and achieve a future we design. We must find the power to choose it. We must first swing back toward a humble recognition of how little we know and seek, together, the future we alone are capable of creating.
Changing course is simple but will not be easy. This is my attempt to begin a collaborative guide by which each of us help all of us chart and tread a path forward.
My ask of you is that you do not hide or hoard your gift. Fight your fear and help us all fight stagnation. Find, accept, and love your uniqueness. Then give it to us.
The above is the introduction to a larger effort. It is incomplete, but I have developed it as far as I can. Help complete it by contributing your thoughts here: https://app.gitbook.com/invite/why-why-why?invite=-Lmdq5uG5Fxmn9gfDGgl
