Mindanao Advice

I recently wrote about two thinkers I discovered in the early 1960s: Erich Fromm and Bertram Dybwad Brochmann. Both gave me hope that I would grow old in a good society and a peaceful world. That hope is now shattered. I believed that their powerful warnings—and equally powerful hopes—about how we could escape alienation, meaninglessness, and destructive social structures would lead to change: Fromm, through his deep insight into the collapse of civilization; Brochmann, through his vision of an ethical economy.

Fromm wrote his books more than sixty years ago. Brochmann presented his social vision during the interwar period. And yet it is Huxley’s and Orwell’s dystopias that have come true—not Fromm’s vision of a “sane society,” not Brochmann’s dream of ethical reform. We were warned, and we ignored the warnings.

A disturbing question is all that is left in me: Is it too late? Is there still hope, or are we collectively driven by a self-destructive impulse stronger than anything else? As of January 28, 2025, the Doomsday Clock stands at 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe.

We know that Trump is a threat to democratic culture and human dignity, yet millions of Americans still rally behind him—in denial, in ignorance, full of false information. We know that Putin rules through violence and lies, yet he remains in power, supported by people who have learned to bow their heads and endure. We watch Gaza being crushed, Ukraine bleeding, and the planet overheating, and we scroll on as if it were just another episode in an endless feed. As a collective, we fail to do what is right.

Fromm called it an escape from freedom. Brochmann saw it as a spiritual and economic collapse disguised as progress. Call it what we like, but the result is the same: a world in free fall while we cling to our routines and wait for someone else to take responsibility.

I now wonder if only a global catastrophe can shake us awake—something that tears down the illusions and forces humanity into the actions needed. Perhaps a third world war. Maybe a climate disaster that renders large parts of the planet uninhabitable. It sounds brutal, but history shows that civilizations rarely change course willingly. First, it must burn.

Even then, rebuilding something new will only be possible if a foundation remains to build upon. Existing networks, values, institutions, experience—all of this must survive in some form, or we’ll end up constructing yet another tyranny. It will require people who are already trying to understand, organize, and create small pockets of meaning and responsibility.

And how long would it last if we did manage to build something better? How long before we start betraying our ideals again? Before power seduces us, and fear makes us obedient? History offers little optimism. Every time light prevails, darkness is never far behind. And maybe that’s our true tragedy: that we never fully learn.

And yet, perhaps there is a kind of hope in that: that even in our darkest hour, someone still chooses humanity. Still stands up. Still remembers. Fromm and Brochmann believed in such people. So do I, though I’m not sure there will be enough of them in time.

But there is still a choice to be made—not for “humanity” as an abstract idea, but for you and me, as actual people in an exact moment. The future is not something that arrives; it is something that is created. It is something we create—or fail to make.

In 2017, Stephen Hawking warned that humanity may have less than a hundred years left on Earth if it continues on its current path. “We have,” he said, “the technology to destroy the planet but not yet the wisdom to escape it.” War, climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence in the wrong hands are a deadly mix we have already begun to stir. Any one of these could, on its own, trigger the end of civilization as we know it. If we are to survive, it will not depend on what we invent, but on whether we grow up in time.

And that time is running out.

Featured image © Eldar Einarson