Fear of the Light

Richard David Hames
7 min readMay 31, 2020

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light ~ Plato

Honest, sensitive, overpowering. His words leapt off the page — etched into my lingering anxieties about the immediate future of humanity, set against the canker which continues to gnaw away at the souls of old empires –actual and imagined.

This particular Facebook comment was posted by a friend in California. A loving family man, smart, a designer of some note. A true visionary. But what struck me was the sense of intense gloom from a human being…

Richard David Hames

Philosopher-Activist and Executive Director at Centre for the Future