Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.

Modernity ideogram

We need new 'headlights'

The way we see the world

By 'headlights', we mean of course the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it.

The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us once again of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human system. And of the importance of those 'headlights'. This crisis was still a relatively minor disturbance—compared to the irreversible changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. Shall we, in the absence of true understanding, resort to age-old scapegoating and blamede "the lazy people on welfare", the immigrant workers, the 1%, the blacks or the whites? Or shall we see our situation in a way that will empower us to resolve it truly, by finding a new course?