While everyone speaks about the merits of humanity, I wish to draw attention to its limits and to the grand horizon that awaits beyond it, beyond the confines of what has defined us as a species over the past 100,000, 10,000, 2,000, 100, or 20 years – a world greater than the one we have become accustomed to.
The world I envision is a realm of endless possibility, and it belongs to the meta-human, a being that will succeed humanity and lay claim not just to Earth, but also to the outer space surrounding us and the inner space within us; a world free from superstition and religion, prejudice and primal instinct.
I’m talking about a system that appreciates intelligence at its most wholesome and interconnected; where life and death weave an elaborate dynamic, of which we are both process and product, participant and observer.
I’m talking about an informed, reformed, post-anthropocentric model, where consciousness is measured through the level of interaction with one’s surroundings and not on a self-righteous agenda founded on tradition.
Or on a social creed buttressed with liberalism.
Or on a moral code that has been spray-painted with supernatural religion.
It’s time to delete these fallacies from our workings, just like we turn off the lights at night to observe the stars. Let us bring out the extra in extraordinary, as befits our potential, and march into the future. Our existence, unbound by dogma, will be guided by the good kind of faith – faith in something much more divine than any given god or deity, such as the ability to think and to speak, to imagine, to explore and discover, to conjure up wonders from nothing and lay them out for all to see, revealing dimensions previously unknown to us; to know the world by knowing ourselves, and each other, and to explore our relationship with everything around us, familiar and unfamiliar, similar and alien, significant and trivial.
We need to have faith in our ability to achieve the impossible and surpass the insurmountable.
We have to face our fears and risk getting hurt.
We must be bold enough to be foolish, and foolish enough to be bold, and go on a journey that will change the course of history.
The world is too outstanding not to explore. We can’t afford to waste any more time wallowing in the comfort of our naivety. Like animals on an isolated island, we’ve become too accustomed to the conditions of our immediate environment, losing sight of the evolutionary expanse that surrounds us. It’s time we stood up and moved on, squaring up to reality and meeting it head on, grappling with whatever it holds in store for us so that we may grow up and become something more than a naive species or – woe’s us – an evolutionary dead end.
Let us look to the future, doing what we can to make sure that the next branch of consciousness stem from us. Let us not be Neanderthals who end up as fossils, or dogs and cats and other such pets, or cows and sheep and all kinds of lunch, or chimps and gorillas, mice and insects that, at best, end up in zoos and parks, or worse, in test labs.
Let us, in short, be mutants. Freaks. Fantastic creatures (about which our pop culture has been raving on in countless books, movies, TV shows, and comics), whose nature it is to rise up and claim the world for themselves, showing the way ahead.
Creatures driven and possessed by something other than the consensually established, the traditionally entrenched, or an instinct so basic, it recycles the nastiest marts of history.
It’s time for a new set of heroes and antiheroes, and a new set of rules.
It’s time for extraordinary change.