The Tide Rises

"I have always believed that the strength and progress of human civilization are by no means measured merely by how much material wealth we produce or how many times our population expands. They should be a shared advancement, material and spiritual, each complementing the other. Without either one, it is like walking on one leg—unable to endure for long."

"And indeed, that is how it has been. When apes bade each other farewell, only a few stones had been ground. When the first humans learned to use tools, civilization turned a new page through that very act. By today's standards, grinding stones was undoubtedly primitive to the extreme. Yet primitive though it was, it represented a technological revolution. Only with that beginning did the brilliant civilizations that followed become possible."

"Since then, technology has continued to update and evolve, but in essence, it is no different from grinding stones. Both involve making use of external power. Thus, today, when material civilization is highly abundant and advanced, a certain view has become widespread: that external power is unreliable, and only one's own strength is real and true; that borrowing external strength is taking a shortcut. This current of thought has won the approval of many."

"I do not deny this view. I simply find it somewhat narrow-minded. But there is one point: intelligence, too, is a kind of power. How can things created through wisdom possibly be called external power?!"

"It should be that any power I can wield is my power. Only what I cannot wield for myself is external power."

"The rapid development of technology has driven material civilization forward at high speed, yet spiritual civilization has failed to keep pace. If this continues, history will inevitably fall into a spiral of steps. Perhaps a hundred years from now,