My dream is to help build another world, an actually better world, one which is peaceful, prosperous, and happy. Given the sheer number of people who wish the other people on this planet rack and ruin, it is perhaps a foolish hope. You can never know what is possible until you try, though.
But I am a student of history, and I cannot but watch in my mind all the great minds and spirits who failed to find a way forward, all the bodies I am stepping over. Most of human history is a history of failure, is it not? Have not wars and injustices and stupidities been our common lot for most of the recorded life of our race?
Has trauma not been an important fact of the lives of most people who have ever lived, and indeed who live even today? Obama was traumatized. I have no doubt of it.
To think new thoughts, you have to step over bodies, you have to have a ridiculous sense of the possible, which necessarily means that you–I–think I am better able to express my intelligence usefully than they did.
And this thought makes me laugh. It has aesthetic merit. It has beauty in it, profound beauty. And this comforts me. And I need comforting. We all do. We all do.
Edit: do you get the feeling sometimes that no important cultural experiments have been done since the 1960’s? That we are stuck looking back, sorting through the rubble and wreckage? That the major cultural changes have been a gradually tightening noose of conformism backed by the threats of social, political, and even physical violence? That “love” is a marketing term, to be abused in the service of consumerism and quarterly results?
I remember the movie “My Dinner with Andre”, and this felt sense that nothing new was going on. No new ideas were being tried. The revolutionary spirit was dead. Everyone got ties, good jobs, mortgages, and life foreclosed on their dreams.
Obama, self evidently, was pushing focus group tested buzzwords when he spoke of Hope and Change. He was touching deep needs that exist in this country at a fundamental level. His appeal was obviously cynical, opportunistic, and abusive, but that does not mean that these words can no longer be used, that there are no causes for hope, that good change is not possible.
Hope. Dare to hope. Dare to dream of a better world, an actually better world. We may just be able to pull it off.
Pyrrhus noted that the Romans died like men, facing their enemy. There is no safety in this world, no absolute safety. In fact, I guarantee Death will get you, like it gets everyone (the Singularity is bullshit). What you can trust is your own resilience, and your own willingness to laugh in the face of everything, to make sport of this eternal game.