What follows is a rather perceptive statement about the way of mind in much of the contemporary world. We find ourselves living in a wash, the colors fading and an emptiness opening deeper and deeper into the caverns of our thoughts and feelings - into our very souls.
Today there is, so they say, a cult of the possible; everything is possible. Certainly, but there is also a new cult of fate: everything can be superseded. Resignation is the undertow to the sense of possibility. The two, the cult of managing our fate on the one hand and the cult of apathy on the other, belong together like two sides of a single coin. The understanding of reality that guides the scientific-technological domination of nature and draws its energy from the cult of the possible, is deeply marked by a representation of time as an empty continuum, growing evolutionarily into endlessness, in which everything is mercilessly, gracelessly enclosed. Even a planet consumed by nuclear explosion is still given up to the empty hypothermia of evolution. This understanding of time eradicates every substantive expectation, and thus engenders that secret identity-crisis that eats away at the souls of modern people. It is difficult to decipher because it has long been practiced successfully under the ciphers of progress and development, before, in brief moments, we discover it at the roots of our souls. ~ Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God (1998), translated by J. Matthews Ashley.
