Fortune and future are closely connected, not only in Renaissance writings but also in public imagination that rules the recent media life. If a person has a fortune, she/he has a future; if not one, then neither. Fortune does not indicate only money or property, it also covers good look, better genes, social acceptability, and, naturally, luck. These are indicators that are ritually connected to a person that has future. In media reality everyone assures that anyone has access to fortune & future if she/he has the right attitude.
In ritual thinking the attitude is all we got. Ritual thinking is an attitude: a narrowed, curtailed standpoint that makes one see only things commonly considered true and appreciated by all. Family values, good things, lip service to all, progress in its modest sense; creativity replaced by procreation, hypocritical remarks in the place morality, repetition instead of thinking. There is no place for reflection, introspection, or hesitation; there is, instead, enough place to pamper superstition, sheer stupidity, and xenophobia.
In media age we completely lost the Romantic self-loathing that love (remember?) once made us feel when not requited. At the same moment we also lost half the history of human emotions; that history is not needed because no one should despise her/himself anymore. Poet's attitude is vain:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least; <…>
In media age we need less and gain more. We belong to humankind that is vaster than ever: billions of people that all want the same, fortune and future. These both comprise the life that is the objective of all of us. We struggle to know how to manage, rule, simplify, and define life in patterns that makes future (and fortune) obtainable for all. Diversity, multiple choises, pluralism are not the key, quite the contrary. One is never able to live sustainable life in plurality: plurality wastes human force, diversity prevents us from gathering the goods in one place only (material or spiritual). Mass society helps us to see where are the true values = values true to many.
In Ortega's analysis (Rebellion of Masses) people were willing to simplify their needs in case they were persuaded with new gadgets and technological novelties. Humankind has suffered from malnutrition and coldness for a long time, about two million years; it is understandable that any once-and-for-all solution will be hailed with praise.
Technology as a totality of solutions is the answer.
Also technology as a way of thinking is the solution (technological thinking).
If we have to leave some other branch of thinking in order to get a solution, let's leave it! Maybe it is true that religion, metaphysics, poetry, romanticism, spiritual awakening, individual happiness, and individual growth have been the obstacles on the way to sustainability of life.
Future may need thinking that is not open-ended but ritual, like technological thinking. The happiness of many requires a clearcut steps, not wandering around and going astray on every other step. The more ritual the thinking is, the more focused it may be. The more focused the thinking is, the more manipulative it is toward the world that may, at last, render back its secrets it once stoled from us.
JV
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