We Have No Future
For most of human history, the future was repetition.
You were born where your father was born. You did what he did. The tools changed slowly. The beliefs changed slower. History moved like a glacier. Heavy, predictable, grinding forward but barely perceptible within a lifetime.
No one needed a vision. Survival was enough.
Then came rupture.
The American Revolution tore monarchy from legitimacy.
The French Revolution detonated hierarchy.
The Industrial Revolution shattered the rhythm of agrarian life.
For the first time, the future was not inheritance. It was construction.
The Enlightenment did not whisper. It declared that the world could be redesigned. Science would expand. Rights would expand. Wealth would expand. Humanity would expand.
It was arrogant. It was naïve. It was violent in its consequences. But it was forward.
Even the Romantics, suspicious of cold reason, were not stagnant. They warned that the machine could devour the soul. William Blake saw dark mills rising over London and sensed spiritual catastrophe. But he burned with vision. He did not want less future. He wanted a different one.
The 19th and 20th centuries were soaked in blood and ambition.
Empires collapsed. Ideologies collided. World wars tore continents apart. Yet even in the wreckage, people still believed in scale.
Skyscrapers pierced the sky.
Nations rebuilt from rubble.
Humans walked on the moon.
There was hubris. There was horror. But there was magnitude.
Now look at us.
We live in the most technologically explosive era in history. Artificial intelligence. Genetic editing. Global networks. Instant communication across continents.
And what is our political imagination?
The right wants to rewind.
It speaks of sovereignty, order, cultural clarity. It promises restoration. A return to stability, masculinity, coherence. It gestures toward a past that feels intact because it is already sealed. No uncertainty. No risk. Memory is easier than invention.
But the past being sold is selective. Sanitized. Stripped of its contradictions. It is a psychological refuge, not a structural plan.
The left dismantles.
Everything is power.
Everything is suspect.
Everything inherited must be interrogated.
It exposes injustice with forensic precision. It deconstructs narratives, symbols, hierarchies. But after the demolition, what stands?
Where is the architecture?
Where is the civilizational blueprint?
Critique is not construction.
So we drift between regression and deconstruction.
One side romanticizes what was.
The other problematizes what is.
Neither describes what will be in a way that people can feel in their bones.
Yes, there are global agendas. Sustainable development goals. Climate targets. Diversity frameworks. Documents with logos and timelines.
They are managerial. They are procedural. They do not ignite.
A civilization is not built on bullet points.
We were promised flying cars.
We got bottle caps you cannot detach.
We were promised space cities.
We got algorithmic moderation.
Mass migration reshapes nations.
Technological automation erodes professions.
Demographic decline hollows out welfare systems.
Trust decays.
People look around and ask a forbidden question: how is this supposed to hold?
Not as a slogan. As a structural doubt.
If no compelling future binds strangers into a common story, they retreat. Into tribe. Into identity. Into grievance.
The right offers belonging through memory.
The left offers moral legitimacy through critique.
Both are backward-facing energies.
The future is handled by committees.
We have become terrified of grand ambition because the last century showed how monstrous ambition can become. So we shrink it. We trade vision for regulation. Destiny for compliance.
No one dares to articulate a civilizational project large enough to justify sacrifice.
Because sacrifice implies hierarchy of values.
Hierarchy implies exclusion.
Exclusion costs votes.
So politicians manage. They arbitrate outrage cycles. They choreograph symbolic battles. They promise safety without transformation.
A society that cannot imagine a shared future becomes administratively stable and spiritually exhausted.
Birth rates fall.
Trust declines.
Language fragments.
The energy once directed toward building cathedrals, railroads, and space programs now dissipates in cultural trench warfare.
We do not lack intelligence.
We lack direction.
And the most dangerous thing is not conflict.
It is quiet resignation.
When people stop believing that tomorrow can be intentionally shaped, they either cling to yesterday or tear down today.
That is where we are.
Not collapsing.
Drifting.