Will Society Ever Be “Enlightened”?

We carry a deep hope that the world is building toward something better, a collective awakening, a golden age. Spiritual circles often nurture this myth: that one day humanity will tip into a higher consciousness, that a new era of light is dawning, that the species itself will become “enlightened.”

It is a comforting dream. It redeems history by making it seem purposeful. It lifts the burden from the individual by promising that we will be carried together. It soothes despair by suggesting that beneath all the chaos, evolution is secretly spiritual.

But will society ever be enlightened? No.

Dreams of Utopia

This dream of a perfected future is not new. It threads through cultures and ages:

• Greek poets sang of a Golden Age, a time when humans lived in peace, harmony, and justice, before decline set in.

• Christian millenarians looked for the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, when evil would vanish and humanity would live in divine order.

• Hindu cosmology speaks of yugas, cycling ages, with the hope that Satya Yuga — the age of truth — will return.

These myths carried comfort across centuries: history was not random, but rising toward light.

The same dream took new forms in modern times:

• The Enlightenment promised that reason, science, and education would inevitably culminate in a rational, just society.

• Communism envisioned the final stage of history: a classless, stateless utopia.

• The New Age movement promised the dawn of Aquarius — a collective spiritual awakening, universal peace, higher vibration.

Every era redressed the same hope: that we are headed somewhere better together.

Today the dream often wears technological clothing.

• Techno-utopians imagine that AI will solve scarcity, erase toil, cure disease, and inaugurate a new human flourishing.

• Transhumanists envision merging with machines, overcoming death itself, ascending as a new species.

• Eco-visionaries dream of a planetary turning: humanity restored to balance with nature, the emergence of a regenerative “new earth.”

Yesterday it was the Kingdom of Heaven. Tomorrow it was the Age of Aquarius. Today it is AI. The costumes change, but the longing is the same: that history itself will awaken for us.

The Vedantic Distinction

Vedanta makes a crucial distinction. Avidya is individual ignorance, the personal mistake of taking the body and mind to be the Self. This can be removed through knowledge. Maya is cosmic ignorance, the veil that projects a world of names and forms in the first place. Maya cannot be destroyed.

Liberation (moksha) means the end of avidya. It is always individual. Even if every human being became a jnani, the world would not vanish — because it depends on Maya, not on your ignorance. The fog still hangs in the sky; the difference is that the wise no longer stumble in it.

The Gunas Do Not Rest

The fabric of nature is woven of the three gunas: sattva (clarity), rajas (activity), and tamas (inertia). They are not static but endlessly churning.

A society can tilt toward sattva for a time. We call these eras golden ages: moments of philosophy, art, harmony, justice. But sattva inevitably yields to rajas, rajas to tamas, and tamas back again to sattva. This cycle cannot be escaped collectively.

Because the gunas never stop shifting, the world will never settle into harmony. Sattva brings moments of clarity, but rajas inevitably rushes in with ambition and restlessness, and tamas drags us down into inertia, ignorance, and decay. Out of this churn come not only beauty and invention, but also conflict, destruction, and despair.

This is why history reads like a wheel: creation, preservation, dissolution, again and again. The costumes change — empires, religions, technologies — but the pattern never does. We can count on more of the same, wrapped in different packaging.

Here Vedanta and Buddhism agree: life under the spell of Maya is ultimately unsatisfactory. As long as we expect the world itself to become pure or stable, we will be disappointed. The churn of the gunas ensures it will not.

The myth of collective enlightenment is dangerous in its subtlety. It:

• Mistakes sattva for moksha — clarity for freedom.

• Confuses cyclical change for progress.

• Externalizes awakening, hoping society will deliver what only the Self can.

It gives us the comfort of imagining we are building up to something pure, when in fact history is not a ladder but a wheel. The gunas turn, and with them civilizations rise and fall.

The Real Hope

So will society ever be enlightened? No. It cannot be, because society belongs to Maya. But individuals can be free. The role of culture is not to save us, but to support seekers — to carve out space for sattva so that Self-knowledge can dawn. The true golden age is not collective, not historical. It is the timeless freedom that arises whenever even one person discovers: I was never bound.