We are so used to enjoy a certain and constant economic growth that when our economy takes a turn, instead of slowing down and changing our lifestyle, it seems we prefer to increase our speed and fall into the abyss.

We see the real, undeniable danger, but we can’t see the salvation because our eyes are only looking short term (the current crisis) instead of long-term (the road ahead).

That change in our level of understanding needed to overcome the crisis, poetically expressed by Hölderlin and philosophically explained by Cummins, finds a new meaning in Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher. Heidegger translates Hölderlin as, “Where danger is, grows the saving power also.”

According to Heidegger, the extreme danger Hölderlin was talking about is the very essence of our technology that, in dehumanizing and reifying people, gives origin to the current capitalist and materialist system, essentially created to exploit people and nature.

The “saving power,” according to Heidegger, is the possibility that, as a reaction to the dehumanizing essence of technology and its cold and calculating “thought system,” a new system will be created where neither humankind nor nature would be labeled as mere “resources.”

¶ 8:09 PM