The reason we can’t know the future isn’t because we lack a magic crystal ball. It’s because we don’t truly understand the present. If we properly and fully understood what is happening in the present, the future would become as clear as the past. For example, if we knew the movement of every piece of matter in the world and the thoughts of every person, the future would become clear. The extent to which we fall short of this is the extent to which our vision is blurred.
We don’t need to know the future in minute detail, down to the second. It’s enough to grasp the major trends. If we can see through phenomena based on observation and collectible information, we can understand the direction in which the world is moving.
When humans can’t see the future, they suffer from anxiety and depression. Then, like Karl Marx, they end up cursing life, cursing the world, and cursing God. Therefore, seeing the future is synonymous with hope. But since seeing the future requires knowing the present, we can say that hope originates from knowing the present.
Reading the newspaper, we easily encounter phrases like “The future is unseen” or “There is no hope.” Especially these days, there are many articles about young people losing hope because the soaring housing prices make it impossible for them to buy even a single apartment in the metropolitan area, no matter how hard they work. Having no hope means not seeing the future, and not seeing the future means not knowing what is happening in the present. If there were young people who properly understood the background of rising housing prices, the population structure of Korea, the case of Japanese real estate, the flow of the global economy, the international situation surrounding China, the movements of international powers related to the reunification of North and South Korea, and the UN Agenda 21, they would at least not despair because of real estate.
To know the present, we must see through phenomena. The reason we can’t do that is because the knowledge we have is wrong or because we lack knowledge itself. It’s because the knowledge we thought we had about people, things, phenomena, and history differs from the truth.
People live their lives thinking they know things they don’t know at all. As a result, they are betrayed by the people they thought they knew best, and when they finally obtain what they had long desired, they feel empty because it turns out to be nothing. They later realize that they exchanged their most precious things for the most trivial things and suffer. They don’t know what they truly want, and above all, they don’t know why they live.
Scholars in proud ivory towers say in unison, “We don’t know the most essential and important things at all, but instead, we know a lot about peripheral things.” Biotechnologists don’t know the origin of life, philosophers don’t know the meaning of life, and economists don’t know how to overcome recessions. Yet, humans live their lives under the illusion that they know something. After creating a plethora of byproducts of knowledge for unnecessary pleasures, they deliver self-congratulatory speeches in the name of progress, and then, to forget the gaping hole they feel in their hearts when they turn around, they cannot stop doing all sorts of meaningless and harmful things. The only thing that is clear to these fools is that everyone will die soon. Thus, these fools walk like zombies towards death.
Being betrayed by the person we thought we knew best reveals the truth that we didn’t know that person at all. If our knowledge about the person we think we know best is at that level, then our knowledge about people we just know casually is needless to say. The fact that most people have similar experiences of this kind shows that virtually everyone lives their lives “knowing nothing about anyone.”
Even so, people live with the grand illusion that they know something about celebrities, politicians, Bill Gates, or Elon Musk. They are mistaken that they know something about life, about the world, about love. Living based on that illusion, they conclude that some are great and some are pathetic. They believe the words of people they don’t even know, even though they can’t trust the words of the people closest to them in their most private spaces. They lack the wisdom to understand that whatever they think they know about them, the complete opposite is likely much closer to the truth. A future of stinging betrayal awaits those without wisdom.
If we have realized that we know nothing about the person we thought we knew best, we should be able to naturally deduce that we are likely completely wrong about everything else we know less about. You might know nothing, after all.
The first step to having hope by truly knowing the present and seeing the future is to know that “I don’t know.” If we assume that we don’t know or that we might be wrong, we can always acquire new knowledge. As our knowledge grows, we further realize how much we don’t know. We realize that everything we thought was important in life, everything we believed to be the principles of how the world works, everything we thought we knew about people, was far from the truth. Around the time we feel the emptiness of being completely deceived by the world, around the time we find ourselves walking through a dark and desolate zombieland after all the dazzling city lights have disappeared, we see a faint light on the distant horizon. That light is not as intense as the city’s neon signs, but it is a light that illuminates the future like a projector.
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