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The future is not what we wanted it to be

In the early 1940’s, Harold Titus wrote Living Issues in Philosophy. The last chapter of the book lists three “discernible trends” Titus hoped to expand worldwide just a few decades after the writing of his book.

Those trends are an increasing cooperation among nations, eventually leading to the elimination of wars and many other social problems; a “more consistent form of democracy” that will replace tyrannies all over the planet; and a change “form self-interest to planning in terms of human welfare”, namely, “cooperative capitalism.”

After 26 chapters of detailed philosophical analysis, Titus was able to provide details about the trends proper of the Modern Age, an age that mortally wounded by two world wars was desperately seeking for meaning. But that same analysis prevented him from jumping over his own shadow to anticipate new trends, including the globalization and technologization of the world, a world still unable to eliminate selfishness and tyrannies.

Seven decades after Titus wrote his book, the optimism he expressed about a future of harmony and progress has been replaced by a reality where we live in constant existential angst, due to ceaseless and sudden social changes that shake us so hard sometimes we don’t even know who we are or what to do.

The difference between what Titus expected 70 years ago and our reality is exemplified in a recent documentary about a group of young people who live in a cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When a reporter asked one of the members of the group why he was living in a cemetery, the teenager answered, “Because I have no future and I was marginalized in the past.”

In other words, because in the past these young people were not accepted by society and because in the present they can’t find direction or meaning for their future lives, they prefer to live as “living dead,” and they express that ideal living in a cemetery and wearing dark clothes.

What happened with those uplifting and inspiring ideals presented by Titus and by so many others who thought Utopia was around the corner after World War II? How come so many serious and reputable thinkers were so wrong about the future? And why a whole generation of young people, in Argentina and in many other countries, lives without a past and without a future, as living dead?

Answering those important questions goes beyond the limits of this column, but I will say one thing. Yesterday I read in the Sunday paper an interview with a 21-year old well-known American actor. He was asked if he had found answers for the “big questions of life.” He said he has not yet found those answers.

Do we really think a 21-year old would have found answers to the big questions of life when we don’t have those answers? Perhaps our youth feel marginalized and without a future, because they see our own duplicity and hypocrisy in the unhealthy way we pressure them to become something they are not.

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