The Metaphysics of Dissent: Who’s Afraid of Free Thought?
Defending creativity means protecting the people who, through collaboration and research, develop ideas that initially seem like science fiction, yet sometimes become part of everyday life within a few decades—or even a few years.
It means preserving a space in which someone can imagine what does not yet exist, find new words, and recognise connections that others have yet to see. When recognition rests in the hands of a few, we must ask how much room there really is for thinking that departs from what has already been approved.
Research needs sources, verification, and debate. Yet rigour and imagination can coexist. A university should also teach people to ask new questions, distinguish an intuition from a demonstration, and develop the former without claiming to have already achieved the latter. If we reward only what is familiar, we risk teaching repetition and encouraging intellectual conformity. Human beings have also been pioneers and explorers: from the migrations of Homo sapiens into territories inhabited by Neanderthals to the voyages of seafarers who ventured into unknown waters aboard rudimentary vessels.
Where trade once centred largely on raw materials and valuable goods, knowledge now strikes me as one of our most precious resources. Without it, we can hardly hope to build a better world. Yet when education continues to teach theories without examining their limitations or the results they have failed to deliver, a paradox emerges: an education intended to expand the possibilities of thought risks becoming an instrument of control.
This is the labyrinth I fear: a world from which ideas can escape while the people who conceived them remain trapped inside. Like smoke rising from a chimney, the essence disperses into the air while the body turns to ash. Thought circulates, is put to use, and is transformed, but the person who gave rise to it disappears behind the result. Those whose knowledge challenges established arrangements can come to be seen as a threat.
In this process, imagination itself can become a commodity: the human capacity to create is packaged and sold as a service. The danger is that, rather than serving society, it is exploited primarily by those who control the resources and direction of scientific research.
Anyone putting forward a discovery encounters evaluation procedures, often conducted by anonymous specialists. These procedures serve a necessary purpose in assessing the work, but we must also question the power they wield in determining which contributions gain credibility and recognition. An assessment of a piece of work can come to be experienced—or used—as a judgement on the overall worth of the person who produced it. As other resources are exhausted, human intelligence risks becoming the last resource left to exploit.
Human beings can destroy themselves in this way, too: even before destroying their bodies, they relinquish their voices. They learn to desire only what they are permitted to desire, to write what will be approved, and to confuse success with worth.
There is no need to imagine a future whose course has already been determined. We need only observe how easily we can adapt until we no longer recognise ourselves, or invest an academic qualification with the power to make us better, allowing it to confirm our convictions rather than prompt us to question them. We can become imprisoned within the theories we have learned, never asking what lies beyond their boundaries. When exploration ventures too far beyond recognised paths, it may encounter pressure to return to established limits. A contradictory condition then emerges: the freedom to think without the recognition that might allow that thinking to be heard.
The study of communication also offers a way to reflect on these boundaries. Communication is a phenomenon around which scientific theories and methods have developed. Within a systemic approach, understanding a family or a group requires more than knowing each individual separately: we must examine relationships, exchanges, and reciprocal influences. An argument, for example, can escalate through a sequence of responses that cannot be explained solely by considering each participant’s character.
A comparison can be drawn with physical systems, in which interactions between components give rise to properties that cannot be understood by examining those components in isolation. Describing an arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons as “greater than the sum of its parts” therefore requires clarification: the expression refers to the properties of the whole, rather than a simple increase in the amount of matter. Physics and communication remain distinct fields, but that distinction does not render every comparison meaningless. Analogy can help us formulate questions and identify connections, provided it is not mistaken for proof.
We constantly speak of systems, yet theories are often presented separately, with too little exploration of their possible connections. I believe this way of organising knowledge will have to change. Educational institutions, too, will be called upon to open a dialogue between the study of matter and the spiritual dimension of human experience, without confining that dialogue to a predetermined framework. Research needs room for the human capacity to explore, imagine, and turn creativity into new possibilities for understanding.
Even the idea that we might exist in two or more places simultaneously can be discussed, provided it is presented as a speculative possibility for which there is currently no evidence in humans. The absence of proof requires clarity about an idea’s status, but is not, in itself, sufficient reason to exclude it from discussion. Even what we cannot yet demonstrate can inspire questions: the task of research is to find rigorous ways to explore them.
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