The Trap of Linear Thinking: Why We Need "Utsuro" (The Void)

The civilizational deadlock of our modern era covers our daily lives like an indescribable sense of entrapment. It is a compelling urgency, a desolation with no escape, pressing against the very throat of each and every one of us. Currently, a vast number of people, driven by the extreme anxiety that “there may be nothing ahead,” are turning their eyes away from an impossible reality on a collective dimension. Consequently, the password has become an invisible totalitarianism: “If everyone looks away, the reality is not there.” Within this circle, days are spent piling sophistry upon sophistry to ensure collective escape, filling the void to merely get by. However, I dare to inform you that this is the primary cause of the current state of Japan—a nation that once achieved prosperity only to reverse course and charge headlong into decline. Even from my perspective, having lived alongside this Japanese situation, it feels as though the world has begun to step into a suspiciously similar future.

On the other hand, the greatest problem is that humanity has reached such an impasse that even collective escapism is becoming difficult. This creaking sound cannot be seen if we limit our thinking to mere individual mental health struggles; it is a structural flaw in the very system we have believed in—or, in other words, the world itself as we believed it to be. Whether one can admit this or not becomes the turning point.

I define this phenomenon as the breaking point of “Linear Thinking,” which people have accepted too uncritically and repeated over and over again. Rather, I even harbor the suspicion that linear thinking inevitably leads to the extremity of regression. And the cruel notification is this: we have not merely hit the limit; we are already beyond this limit. That is why we are running about in confusion.

Since the modern era, humanity, programmed to climb the infinite stairs of capitalism and the progressive view of history, has blindly believed that by striving for higher, further, and more, we could reach a rich utopia never before experienced. A “transcendence” was always set at the tip of that vector, and we doubted not that a happy utopia lay therein. However, now that we have actually climbed those stairs to the top, there is neither utopia nor dystopia, but merely a cruel truth. It was a world that extinguishes life. Dystopian theory is ultimately of the same root as utopian theory, so it is meaningless.

Modern people labor under the illusion that if they climb the structural ladder, they will inevitably reach meaning, but they fail to realize the fatal defect that the summit is “Nihility” (Void)—a truth built in from the very beginning. To reach the summit means that the entire process is completed. Particularly in linear thinking, completion is synonymous with ending—that is, death. We have ascended solely with the aim of being filled, and since World War II, we have accelerated that speed. But ironically, the terminus reached by linear thinking was the emptiest place of all, where nothing exists.

The burnout occurring worldwide today, the complete loss of the will to live, should not be thought of in terms of individual mental fragility. It signifies that the entire civilization built on linear thinking, having climbed to the top, has faced the singular fact that it has arrived at a place of nothingness, triggering a state of collective hypoxia. There are countless human-shaped figures there; their hearts may be beating, but they are not alive. The prevalence of such a zombie-like state of survival was the determined conclusion to which the very roots of the civilization we ride upon were destined to lead.

In short, the civilization of linear thinking is already finished. There is simply a time lag, and within the span of a single human life, we cannot experience the entirety of that lag. Therefore, it is impossible to believe it has not ended yet; the next mode of thought begins only with the thorough understanding that it is already over. Unfortunately, because everyone is unable to question the very foundation of linear thinking and posits their next thoughts upon it, all discussions become drivers for a farcical charade rampant on a global scale—where nothing is said, and nothing is done. Intellectuals in a linear world amount to, after all, only that much.