Why the hardest part of building the future is letting go of the past

It’s interesting to think about what the world looked like for America’s Founding Fathers. 1776 wasn’t just a revolutionary year for giving birth to America; it also kicked off the first Industrial Revolution with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, and modern capitalism with Adam Smith’s publishing of The Wealth of Nations. Many of the debates we have today about economics, industry, and politics would have been nonsensical in 1775. For people living at the time, feudalism, mercantilism, and the divine right of kings seemed the natural way of the world. They never experienced anything else. But after 1776, everything would change. We appear to be going through a similar transition today. The neoliberal order is under siege, while technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology are creating completely new paradigms. Much like the founders 250 years ago, the hardest part isn’t inventing the future, but letting go of the past. History shows that struggle is unavoidable. What Euclid’s Geometry Never Got Straight The basic geometry we learn in grade school, also known as Euclidean geometry, is rooted in axioms drawn from everyday experience, such as the principle that two parallel lines never intersect. For thousands of years, mathematicians built proofs based on those axioms to create new knowledge, such as how to calculate the height of an object. Without these insights, our ability to shape the physical world would be negligible. But what if one of those foundational assumptions was wrong? What if space itself could be curved, so that lines that appear parallel might eventually intersect? In the 19th century, some of the world’s most celebrated mathematicians, like Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann, started asking those questions and came up with entirely new geometries based on non-Euclidean spaces. At the time, these were seen as purely theoretical and of no use in daily life. The universe, as we experience it, does