Reflections about the central societal challenge for the
second quarter of the 21st century: the Human Anastasis
by J Michael Heynen
I. What was it?
The international Societies entered the uncertainties of the 21st century based on the certainty of their 20th-century experiences, yet the insights gained from empirical evidence were largely ignored. And right from the start—in a strategically consistent and post-imperial manner—the old fatal game of artificially dramatized antagonisms was resumed, this time largely internationalized and militarized. The purely speculative narrative of the "clash of civilizations" became the paradigm of simple people and their leaders, ultimately becoming the normative framework for state action based on globalizing, egomaniacal projections.
9/11 then shaped the further course of the first quarter in the same bitter patterns and escalations of violence: the fragmentation of the fragile international system and the obviously intended entropy of "democracy" through the definitive abandonment of transparency and integrity in the processes of finding truth and justice. The apparent irreversibility of this development was further reinforced years later by civilizational measures such as epidemics on a global scale. The dissolution of any order as the basis and condition of freedom led directly back through the 20th century to the 18th/19th century: a backwardly time lapsed, dystopian process leaving a reptilian labyrinth as so-called world order.
II. The Omnipotent Ego of the substructure
This systematically initiated and expanded process—deliberate conflict escalation, the complete dissolution of order coupled with a politicized explosion of bureaucracy, state-sanctioned overconfidence in "governing," generally incompetent leadership, individual freedoms existing only as a "diaspora," etc.—results in the widespread evaporation of societies and states and their constitutive connection to the legitimacy of statehood.
Above all, formerly democratic societies have been quantitatively conditioned by collectivist, materializing ideologies instead of being qualitatively determined, deepened, and dynamized on the basis of the subject's autonomy. Consequently, the so-called democratic orders of international relations have also become entangled in endless antagonisms and double standards as pure interest-driven politics and have thus been eliminated. The so-called “democratic universalism” thus revealed itself as an imperial and feudalizing strategy and ended in a dead end: “The West and the Rest”!
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Peace of Westphalia fell victim to egomaniacal projections of power—underpinned by technological and economic considerations, nihilistic materialism, and camouflaged by transhumanism. Instead of governing the present and future in a meaningful and peace-creating way from the superstructure, the substructure, derived from reality and its "normativity of the factual," becomes the sole modality of governing, thus illegitimate and necessarily escalating violence. Societies thus founded the state only at least to ultimately serve as an egomaniacal projection screen for decoupled statehood and soon to be abandoned to themselves through complete depletion of substance: The new beginning!
III. A Way Out?
The first quarter of the 21st century, with its multi-causal and multilateral crises and conflicts, definitively proves the inadequacy of governing factual reality from within its immanence. Human life means choosing, but choosing does not mean egocentrically selecting the conditions of reality that suit one's needs. Furthermore, it does not mean egomaniacally bending the constants of cosmic law, but rather, on the contrary: shaping and ordering the conditions of reality based on the determination of universal (cognitive) lawfulness. Only in this way can the individual freedom and creativity of the subject arise. And therein lies perhaps the only way out of the civilizational crisis, enabling us to reach the future and shape it in a way that is worthy of human dignity.
Those who recognize this crisis and its causes automatically open themselves to transition and transformation: to emancipation in the sense of finally becoming adults, to the reconnection of inner and outer worlds (consciousness first and as the driving force), and to the return of human development to the evolutionary grid of universal creation (Teilhard de Chardin) – from full self-empowerment and self-determination, initiated and legitimized by individual universality.
The ultimate end of civilizational development becomes a new beginning through reopen up to the true power of creation: from the reconnection with the inner world/self as the foundation of an emancipatory self-awareness, the civilizational world is reshaped, from the real world of the individual's inner self-determination as a responsible agent of human development.
This kind of Copernican revolution, the quantum leap into and out of the self, describes freedom and order arising from creative humanity. Such a fundamental shift from the material to the immaterial, from matter to guidance from spirit and consciousness, is the leading principle of human development in the second quarter of the 21st century. With this finally begins the true evolution of humanity: from adolescent to adult. The associated return to guidance from spiritual substance is simultaneously the definitive re-entry into the evolutionary process in accordance with creation as the central civilizational achievement of humankind: from object to subject, the co-creator of creation!
The ongoing Anthropocene is the historical nexus of transition and transformation into the self-dynamized nousphere, the space for shaping and resonating with humanity's dignified life—individually and (inter-) societally self-determined and balanced: a kind of anastasis from the soulless person to the human being of spirit and consciousness - the "Phoenix rising from the ashes!"
J Michael Heynen
Montana, Curacao
November 22, 2025
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