We live immersed in the short term. We’ve grown accustomed to it. Our awareness of ourselves, our decisions, our “projects” is imprisoned by an invisible prison: the long term seems distant, abstract, unreal.

This is no coincidence; many factors converge in this phenomenon: the culture of instantaneousness to which new technologies subject us; anti-metaphysical prejudices, which narrow our horizons to the sensorially evident world; personal and collective anxieties that force us to save our own skin rather than think about future generations; or the thirst for power that compels us to impose ourselves, as if suddenly, on others, abandoning friendship, patience, and forgiveness.

In the social and political life of nations, short-termism is evident in the epidemic of authoritarian leaders who seek to destroy their adversaries at all costs, even if it means the most conspicuous means, the most abhorrent betrayals, and, of course, surrendering their most cherished principles.

“Statesmen” who approach reality with a long-term vision of the common good are extremely rare. In more than one Latin American society, the expressions “there is no way out,” “we don’t see how,” “there are no conditions for change” multiply. Daniel Innerarity recently wrote: “If modernity affirmed itself as a present superior to its past, today we find ourselves in a state of mind that assumes the future will be worse than our present. It’s not just reactionaries who defend the idea that the past was better; those on the left who predict a catastrophic future also think this way.”

Bookstores, on the other hand, seem to confirm this in a gentle or brutal way, through their “new releases” tables for the year 2025: The Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert Kaplan ; Six Minutes to Winter by Mark Lynas; Global Collapse and War by Eduardo Saxe; or the novel All the Ends of the World by Andrea Chapela.

Humanity is indeed threatened. How can we transcend short-termism to take true responsibility for the future? How can we address the immediate future without sacrificing the medium and long term?

Anna Rowlands , in her book Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times, offers a hypothesis. By engaging with Hannah Arendt, embracing some powerful insights from the theologian Ivan Illich, and the perspective of Simone Weil, she succeeds in pointing out that it is only possible to take charge of the future by relearning to live the parable of the “Good Samaritan” in a concrete and personal way, not as a pious little tale with a moral, but as a poignant wake-up call to recognize that He who sustains History bursts into the present through the weakest, the poorest, the most marginalized, who is my brother.

In this way, by empirically welcoming the wounded along the way, it is possible to perceive that the present is pregnant with a future that entails redemption. This is how we existentially discover that evil will not have the last word. Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV could not agree more on this matter.