What We Are vs. What We Could Be

I have my share of existential crises when I’ve been doing too much thinking. One thing I think about sometimes is the delta between what we could be as the human race, and what we actually are (at least today).

There’s this indie movie that I saw in college called Cube. It’s about people who are trapped in this maze-like structure of cubes that is constantly changing and full of death traps. It’s a story about different types of people trying to work together to solve a problem, but underneath it’s really a commentary about how governments, societies and companies create things that are ultimately “headless” and may not even have a cohesive vision or purpose, with no one at the wheel.

Here’s a representative line from the film:

Holloway: It’s all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it’s two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.

If we as humans were at our maximum potential, we’d have clean power right now across the globe that no one has to pay for. We’d have enough food for everyone to eat, and it would be grown efficiently and in the most healthy ways. Our cities would be built with amazing architecture that inspires the mind and displays our creative ingenuity in form and engineering, instead of a bunch of giant boxes with windows. We would throw to the ground any technology or component of life that doesn’t serve all of us in an enriching, positive way (bye ad-driven internet). We could do all of this. We have proven our intelligence and we could do it.

But we don’t. We do some things well, but we drop the ball when it comes to turning away from our own selfishness. We let the potential slip away to serve our own individual needs for control, personal comfort and ego. We build things that are ugly or broken or harmful because a minority of us want the financial benefit from speed and scale. We are not what we could be. And I get really depressed by that if I think about it too much.

We are definitely better off than we have been in past centuries, for sure. Maybe there’s hope for meeting our potential and we’re just slow at moving the needle? Or maybe we fall back two steps too often because we have a hard time aligning with a vision and not taking the lazy sheep route.

In my Eastern Civ class in college, I was really struck by the continued pattern of humanity throughout the dynastic cycles of China over thousands of years. A civilization is established, it flourishes under competent rule, it grows fat, corrupt and unbalanced, and then is overthrown and reset when the lower classes revolt, only to begin again. When this pattern repeats itself over and over throughout all of recorded history … how can we have hope to break free from our own tendencies and become everything we could actually be?

One thing seems to settle in my gut after I finish thinking about all of it — this feeling that we will eventually achieve the ultimate positive version of what we are capable of, or we will bring about our own destruction. We are accumulating enough power and technology as a species to make that seem like an inevitability.

If there’s one lesson to take away from Cube … it’s this: know what you are contributing to with your choices and actions. We all inevitably shape our world, even if we don’t take the time to look at what that shape is.

Leaven: [Leaven, Kazan & Worth reaching the exit of the cube] What are you doing? You can’t quit now. It’s not your fault!
Worth: I have nothing… to live for out there.
Leaven: What is out there?
Worth: Boundless human stupidity.
Leaven: I can live with that.