What gives you hope?
Hope is the energy recoiled in the stress of adversity that is ready to spring into action as resourcefulness. All our stories, ancient and new, reflect this coincidence of opposites between hopeless adversity and hopeful resourcefulness. Disadvantage drives creativity and the growth of the mind. The disadvantaged therefore has the cutting edge. The privileged, on the other hand, is complacent and dull—neither hopeless, nor hopeful. Therefore, the very real adversities that people inflict on other people, the climate, and nature—I hope—will inspire new solutions, inventions, and discoveries. The resourcefulness of the disadvantaged, especially that of the migrant child gives me hope.

How does change happen?
How can change not happen? All our civilizational ambitions are about arresting the flow of change by building homes, fences, churches, scientific systems, political institutions, etc. Totalitarianism is a political system that aims at freezing change; democracy is a system that aims to ensure the seamless change of power as if surfing on the waves of change. New engineering technologies do not aim at a rigid stability of a mechanical kind but at the adaptability to change, a quality of flexible resilience, found in biological nature as if surfing the waves. Our human institutions, with their rigid bureaucracy, could learn from bio-mimetic technology how to surf the incessant waves for demand, for creative changes and adjustments.

What is human?

According to Michael Oakeshott, we are not born human and only become human by learning how to be free. Which means that the so-called human condition is our capacity for liberal learning.