Time & Perspective Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal’s line reads like a warning disguised as a diagnosis: we keep confusing what we want with what’s going to happen, then calling the mash-up “reason.” Coming from a scientist who spent his career thinking in systems (from crystallography to sweeping, often controversial visions of social planning), it’s not mystical so much as clinical. He’s naming a persistent cognitive failure: the human mind treats desire as data and fate as a negotiable draft.

The phrasing matters. “Two futures” is a neat, almost laboratory division, but it’s immediately undermined by the claim that reason can’t keep them apart. That tension is the subtext: rationality isn’t a clean scalpel; it’s a tool handled by an animal with stakes. “Future of desire” points to projection, ideology, and the stories we tell to make uncertainty feel tractable. “Future of fate” is the impersonal chain of constraints: physics, biology, institutions, accident, inertia. Bernal isn’t saying fate is absolute or desire is irrelevant; he’s saying our forecasts, policies, even personal plans get warped when we smuggle one into the other.

The context is a 20th century that repeatedly mistook ambition for inevitability: technocratic dreams of progress, political utopias sold as historical destiny, and scientific advances drafted into moral alibis. Bernal, a committed Marxist and public intellectual, knew both seductions from the inside. The intent lands as a challenge: if “reason” can’t separate desire from fate on its own, we need disciplines, institutions, and self-suspicion strong enough to do it for us.