Illustration Corinna Heumann / Text Susanne Gold

There is no nation, I see, no matter how fine and educated, how raw and ignorant, that does not believe that the future can be interpreted and that it can be recognized and predicted by certain people

(Cicero on Divinatione)

The spirit of the individual – the future of all?

What Cicero wrote about the oracles in the distant past was and still is valid for all cultures and peoples. Because all over the world and at all times people were convinced that a superior will determines our fate and the events of the world. The question is – which and whose will?

Gnothi Seauton! – Know thyself!

This sentence stood over the oracle of Delphi between the 5th century and Roman times. It was a place of pilgrimage for all people who were looking for answers for the future. The question of the future will continue to accompany us humans – through all eras and cultures. Until we ourselves will no longer exist. Futurologists have and had many names: Shamans, prophets, oracles, visionaries, prognosticators, futurologists and Utopiensammlerin.

Orientation towards the future is and has been an essential part of our development. The way we forecast our future enables us to solve problems and steer our fate.

I think that’s what human brains are made for: We create the future. We gain information from our environment, from the past and from the present, and we use this to produce the future. And the more future we can produce, the more freedom we have!

(Paul Valéry, French poet, philosopher and essayist)

Our prognoses may be individual, we are not.

We humans are inseparably linked to what surrounds us!

We do not exist without the others. Everyone is for himself and yet only a part of the whole, a single voice in the orchestra of the world. A world in which each one of us is the centre of his own universe and yet cannot survive without the others. In this world orchestra, our individual spirit is nothing more than a subjective and at the same time rational stopping point for our own experience of the world.

We – characterized by a constant confrontation with the people and places of our world. The way we shape our encounters in the present determines not only our individual destiny, but the future destiny of all people in the world.

That is why our personal vision of the future is also the entry point into the future world of all people.