These are terrible times: the global warming that has made natural disasters more virulent and regular than ever before and the prospect for the arrival of an unguarded AGI (the Big Brother of AI) now being projected before 2030 are existential questions for humanity which, added to the undercurrent of a looming global cataclysm between warring nuclear powers or a division of the world political map between totalitarian oligarchies, shrouds reality with a dark shade of ugly grey. So terrible is the current situation that many people turn off from reality by ignoring it, getting on with their lives from a position of denial, while others watch in a mixture of doubt and disbelief as irrational behaviour streams torrentially through the media, propagated by those who stand in positions of what used to be the supposedly caring roles of leadership. The madness we live in invites laughter at times, for in essence it is more absurd than real, but an insanity none the less. The consumer age that is ours cannot be perpetuated without serious consequences and part of those consequences are the death throes of capitalism and the fall of civilisation as we know it today. We have an anxious world population, tormented by the snowballing growth of uncertainty that infects our lives: uncertainty for the present states and even deeper uncertainty for the future.

Given this pessimistically bleak world scenario, the current nihilistic worldviews that are propagated by our consumer-age reality can offer no answers other than to seek consolation through the therapy of shopping (the more compulsive the better). This has to change. The problems facing humanity today are deeply serious and rooted in the dilemma between survival and extinction. A radical, systemic change is needed for us to ever be able to overcome these existential threats around us. This is understood by political extremists and is being milked to the advantage of far-right ideologies. At the same time political alternatives to the far-right seem useless, for while the political centre is fundamentally a mirage and a great lake of impotence the radical left remains the hot house of moralistic squabbling that it has always been and no saviour seems to be anywhere within the political, ideological spectrum of salvation. To get back on track there needs to be a psychological shift in our collective worldview. Only when humanity starts taking a more positive, optimistic view of a future embedded in meaningfulness will Humanity with a capital H become possible. And Humanity is what humanity needs. In this nihilistic age, an anti-nihilistic worldview, a new radical kind of optimism, is the only positive way forward.

To accomplish this we have to rethink what we are. To do that we have to reconsider where we have come from and find the positive, because authentically natural, evolution of what our authentic nature is. To do this we must investigate the composition of everything with a positivistic bias and look for a natural, universal meaning to reality – a natural, embedded reason for humanity being in the world. To do that we have to start with the question of why: Why is there a phenomenon like human beings in the world? Our existence here has been the result of a very long and intricate process of evolution that began with the beginning of everything, i.e., the Big Bang, and the key to our reason for being rests in that same evolutionary process. The same key that opens the door toward a new, radical positivism.

Once we consider life – and especially the evolution of sapiens organisms – as part of an evolutionary process, then we start to perceive the cosmos as something that is striving toward a necessary final form, wherein, through complex, intelligent life forms, its true sense, its reasons, are being disclosed and its short-comings might be overcome. This implies a tremendous, implicit symbiosis between intelligent life-forms like us and an otherwise blind, unconscious universe. And if this companionship with the universe is real, then this suggests that we have been created by cosmological evolution in order to participate in the greatest, most purposeful task of all – the process by which the blind universe comes to see and know itself. Our consciousness makes the universe itself, self-aware.

Arguably, we participate in this relationship whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not. Our sapiens nature implicates us in the task at hand in an unavoidable way. Nevertheless, our non-sapiens (anti-human) historical process has led us away from this essential meaningfulness. The anti-human development of civilisation has been a process that has pulled us ever more distant than the natural evolution which would have lifted us toward an authentic involvement in cosmological needs and the disclosure of the real meaningfulness of our companionship with the universe. By pushing us away from authentic purposiveness, historical process has created a civilisation fashioned from the absurd resignations of nihilism and the superficial relativity that can justify any argument whatsoever. Logic, however, tells us quite clearly that the world does not exist for us, but we exist for the world – that is our most pressing responsibility, and from that idea we can start to build the Humanity we have never properly had.

Authentic meaning is the most deep and enriching discovery that could be made, but the truth is that meaning still needs to be uncovered. And authentic meaning, like all meanings, is the answer to a question, the result of an investigation. It has an essentially enigmatic nature and it must always be remembered that the meaning of Meaning is to find the meaning. Meaning is morphic – each answer raises different questions with new and different answers. In this way, Meaning (with a capital M) is an accumulation of all discoveries made in the quest for Meaning. From this idea a new positivistic view of humanity and a radically new human optimism can be forged. The radical positivism we now so desperately need to pull us up and away from the stifling nihilism that is consuming us.