I often wonder what people understand by "progress." What does progress mean to a dentist, a truck driver, a teacher, a parent, an elder, or a postal worker? What does progress mean to a high-school student, or a college graduate? What does it mean to you?
Do we measure progress by technological advancement? By how much money we earn? By comfort levels? Do we measure progress based on the quality of our own personal lives, or by the quality of humanity, as a whole? Do we believe in progress, or is progress just an expression or measure of our level of luxury? Is progress for everyone, or should be a rewarding mechanism - granted only to specific groups of people...or nations - based on their status, wealth, military power, skin color?
I strongly believe that our species is lost. When a person gets lost, they feel disoriented, often afraid or at least worried at first. When a regular person gets lost, the temporal distance between confusion and panic is measured in their mental resilience and the inverse of their awareness and intelligence. Some of us know when we are lost and some of us have no idea what lost feels like even when they are completely lost. On top of it all, we can be collectively lost and individually react to being lost in entirely different ways.
Then of course, comes the question - where or what are we lost from? Being lost can mean that we forgot our point of origin, or we forgot our chosen destination. Or, it can mean both - forgetting where we came from and also where we were going to.
I believe that the worst and the most dangerous kind of “lost” is when we have lost the ability to recognize when we are being lost. When that happens, we stop, because we believe that we have already arrived at our destination, or that at least we are on exactly the path we think we should be on. We no longer think beyond the path we’re on. We no longer consider the possibility of being lost and on the wrong path. When that happens, we no longer even follow the road, we let the road take us wherever it may lead us - because we can no longer conceive of being possibly lost. When lost from our own capacity to recognize being lost, we give priority to our power and agency to collect pebbles along the path we travel on, while at the same time abandoning the sovereignty to choose the path itself.
At that point, a higher power guides us, may that be a shepherd or a tyrant. Or both. While we are being allowed to choose our clothes, buy our homes, sell our skills, amuse ourselves, or even fight amongst each other, we are also denied the option to determine the direction we are traveling, because us being lost from the capacity to recognize when we are lost IS the destination of a system meant to make us collectively forget that we can all - as individuals - navigate together toward collective destinations.
For me, progress cannot be quantified by a single parameter (like better wages or better medical care). For me, progress is a functional system that accounts for each individual life, a system based on cooperation instead of exploitation, protective instead of coercive. Progress, for me, is a new level of social evolution - as a society - rather than individual benefits. Progress is a state of mind and a profoundly altruistic modus operandi at individual level.
Ironically, progress is a built-in feature in most species. Human intelligence - through imagination, creativity, and ingenuity - allows us to manifest and manipulate our built-in capacity for progress. The same intelligence however, allows us to turn predatory and destructive to the point where the collective power collapses and shifts from entire societies into the hands of a few individuals. I call this counter-progress.
The antidote to this predatory counter-progress is cooperation and collaboration on a different level than the one of the daily tasks allowed by the predatory system built around us. Cooperation and collaboration starts with communication. Communication can happen when we acknowledge one another and we listen to one another. If we begin to communicate on the same “frequency” level of our innate, built-in progress capacity, we will rediscover our natural navigational system as a species and we will remember what progress feels like - because most of us have experienced it already.
As far as I am concerned, my entire life I have been calling you. In one way or another, I have come to realize that my entire existence has been influenced by a continuous attempt to send you a message. I have been calling, in various ways, to say one single thing. As life went on, I experienced passion, despair, sadness, and joy. Never regret, never envy. Fear? Yes. Lots of it. Pain? Yes, lots of it. All of it originating from a single source - I have been calling, and nobody answered.
I admit that many times I did stop calling, then started again. I fell and gave up, then stood back up. Crawled back up if I needed to. From being silent, to attempting to call again.
Should anyone ever pick up, they will now hear a much more concise message, because time has run short, for me at least but probably for you as well.
“Progress, true progress, is possible and you already know how.”
I will probably never entirely give up on humanity - on you - until my time is up. When that happens, my voice will fall eternally silent, but I ask you all to just pause and listen. There are countless calls around us all, trying to reach out, trying to connect.
Pick up and say hello. If you all do this, what some of you call a “miracle” and others call “impossible” - will happen. Because this is what progress is fueled by - possibility.
Answer its call.
Bo
https://www.project-forward.org/
P.S.: A little something special, just for you:
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