QUESTION6.com
The world we live in
2 - We, the people, are not happy
Living in society creates problems. We must sacrifice some individual freedom. Everybody must drive on the same side of the road. Our solution was to make laws. Unfortunately, our laws are replacing freedom with rules. We pretend to preserve individual freedom by making laws that limit freedom. This is the same problem doctor shave. They can prescribe medication that will help you as long as you don’t go over a certain dose. Above that come the side effects that could send you to emergency. “Use but don’t abuse” is a law of nature that we can find in many domains, from a glass of wine to borrowing money. In our case, we have an individual who was born free and is ready to die for freedom. He also needs to live in society. The problem is to find the right dosage of laws above which the solution becomes a problem. We are not talking about protecting the public from serial killers. We are talking about protecting the public from an overdose of Law. It is a grey area where everything is possible but there is no guaranty. We tried different solutions. We experimented with dictators who were sure that they had found the final answer. We also had lawless societies. We are still looking for the right dosage.
Laws are necessity that should be used but not abused.
Many things are changing in human life. Developing new technologies gave us the impression that the Homo sapiens, after a long period of incubation, were getting out of their shell. We were ready to dominate the world with our thinking. We were the captains of our ship. Planet Earth will soon be the cultural center of the Milky Way. The stage was set for a big deception. A catastrophe! An act of God! Astronomers told us that our material world represented nothing more than 5% of reality. Most of it was made of dark matter and dark energy. They found by looking at the trajectory of distant galaxies that the universe is expanding. There is a force fighting our universal attraction and we are not winning. We are not the king of the jungle. We are more like the little bird breaking out of its shell and discovering that it cannot fly. What a disappointment! Did we fight the wrong battle when developing cars, planes, electricity, cell phones, vaccines satellites and computers? Did we spend too much time focusing on the body instead of the soul?
In the last 200 years, people left their villages and moved into cities looking for a better life. In a village, people knew each other. Not just names, but stories. They knew who you were, where you came from, and what you cared about. There was a sense of being seen. Today, thousands can live in the same building and never exchange a word. We pass each other every day, and yet we remain strangers. Sometimes it feels like we are all placed side by side, organized and efficient, like eggs in a basket, close, but not truly connected. Safe, but alone.
We did not get together to feel isolated.
Something is missing in our modern society. It is not something tangible that can be bought. How can we describe something we never had? We are like an orphan missing his parents. Imagine a child who was raised by robots. They did their best and he is miserable. What will make us happy? Is it to develop robots that will take care of us, or taking care of each other? Does happiness come from the body or from the soul?
We started by taking care of the body, and with good reasons. Our first concern was to stay alive. Our body is high maintenance. It must be fed three times a day, cleaned often, taken to the dentist, to oculist, the barber. It is our only means of transportation. It has priority over anything else. That does not mean that our body alone can make us happy.
Children can help. They don’t know the laws. They are not prisoners of our material world. They can make a race car out of a card box and live the life of a champion. They are free. They can communicate with horses, donkeys and ducks. Children remind us of a lost world. Their message is that, over the years, freedom fades away. It could be a slow erosion that we tolerate, or it could happen under duress. The result is the same. Our society can dissolve freedom.
Society can dissolve individual freedom.
We would not complain about having to drive on one side of the road, even if we prefer the other side. The problem starts when the number of limitations accumulate. There is a torture called “the thousand cuts” where the victim succumbs to many small cuts to his body. Did we create a society with many small cuts in our freedom?
We are born naked and hungry. This is not a good position to negotiate. All we can do is cry. That does not mean that we must surrender. A human being is the association of a body and a soul. Our body comes with a set of sense organs that are easy to use. Through our body we can see, smell, hear and touch the material world around us. They provide us with a constant flow of information.
However, what is important is in our soul. This is where we find love, consciousness, harmony, feelings, ideas and everything that does not have shape, weight or color. Scientists cannot take souls in their lab and experiment on them. What is most important in our life is not in the scientific domain.
This unease is not limited to one country, one generation, one religion, or one culture. It seems to belong to something deeper in humanity. A kind of spiritual homesickness. There is a feeling of emptiness that cannot be measured. A feeling that, despite all our progress, we may have drifted away from something essential.
Not long ago, children used to play together in the meadows. They climbed trees, ran freely, laughed loudly, and didn’t need much to feel alive. They learned, without thinking about it, how to share space, how to argue, how to forgive, how to listen to the birds, how to belong. Today, many of them sit still for hours, staring at computer screens, playing alone even when they are technically ‘connected’. Something has changed—not just how they play, but what it means to become a mature adult. Something has changed in the people that our society is producing. It could be better. It could be worse. It could be both at the same time. The truth is, deep down, that we do not really know what we are doing and where human evolution is leading us.
Everything is accelerating. Work, money, family life, and even friendship, are being reshaped faster than we can follow. We can no longer pretend that we are sailing calmly on a quiet river and remain the master of our ship. The current is speeding up. We struggle to master the wind blowing in our sails.
Our lives are more comfortable than ever, but comfort is not enough. We can have everything we need and still feel empty. We are not made of flesh and bone alone. We also carry something invisible - call it a soul, a need for meaning, for love, for connection, for purpose.
The latest upheaval is AI, which may change not only what we do but also how we think. We stand at the edge of artificial intelligence, and we know that something even more powerful will follow. Is that a solution to our problems or will it make them even worse?
How can we give people the internet, telephones, TV and so many ways to facilitate communication and end-up with souls in solitary confinement? Something went wrong somewhere. The society that we created is a pedestal without a statue! This is not the world we want to live in.
The society we created is a pedestal without a statue.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,
but spiritual beings having a human experience.
Teilhard De Chardin
The real question is not what we can build next, or how fast we can go. It’s much simpler, and much more difficult at the same time. Do we need more information or more understanding? More noise, or more silence? More things, or more meaning? More thinking or more love?
The answer will not come from governments. It will come from free individuals.
