Love God. Love Neighbor.
Get Understanding

Musa Mwanza

Augustine of Hippo famously said, "Our heart is restless until it finds rest in Thee," a truth that still echoes today. In modern life, this restlessness has intensified, leading many to feel a deep sense of social isolation. To understand why his diagnosis is so urgent today, we must view modern life through his concept of the 'Two Loves.' From this flows a genealogy of individualism that the fifth industrial revolution has both perfected and poisoned, creating a vacuum that the Global Connect ecosystem is uniquely positioned to fill.

Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God, is built upon a stark and simple premise: two distinct loves have created two distinct societies. He writes, "Two loves have formed two cities: the love of self, even to the contempt of God, forms the earthly city and the love of God, even to the contempt of self, forms the heavenly city." This is the seed of the West's long experiment with individualism, which has been exported throughout the world, including the global south. The "love of self" is not merely vanity; it is the orientation of one’s entire being toward the self as the ultimate source of meaning, truth, and fulfillment. It is a love that turns inward, making the individual the sovereign lord of their own life.

The arc of this inward turn spans from Augustine's earthly city to the Renaissance's celebration of human potential, and ultimately to the Enlightenment's focus on individual reason and rights. 
Yet it is in the modern and postmodern eras that this trajectory reaches its peak, and subsequently its breaking point. The "love of self" morphed from a spiritual danger into a social and economic virtue. Set free from tradition, community, and God, the individual was promised liberty. Yet, as the philosopher Charles Taylor describes, this created a world of "expressive individualism," where the paramount duty is to discover and realize one's own authentic self.

This brings us to the present, to the fifth industrial revolution. While previous industrial revolutions were about harnessing steam, electricity, or information, this one is characterized by a fusion of the digital, physical, and biological worlds, with a specific focus on the human experience. Its promise was intoxicating: a world where connection required no effort, community required no proximity, and gratification knew no limit. Yet in essence, it became the perfect technological enabler for the “love of self.”

The very tools built to bridge us have become the architects of our own isolation. The global village has, for many, become a lonely crowd staring into personalized screens. This is the cruel irony of the fifth industrial revolution. It perfected the infrastructure for the "love of self" while systematically dismantling the conditions for the "love of God" (or for any love of the "other" that requires true sacrifice, presence, and vulnerability). The result is not a world of fulfilled individuals, but a pandemic of restless, anxious selves. We are hyper-connected as data points but relationally impoverished as human beings. The "restlessness" Augustine diagnosed as a spiritual ailment is now clinically visible as an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. The earthly city of self-love, powered by AI and social media, has built magnificent palaces but left its citizens starving for the bread of genuine connection.

It is precisely here, in the ruins of hyper-individualism, that the promise of Global Connect emerges. Global Connect offers a practical, lived alternative to the disordered loves of our age. It is an attempt, however small and deliberate, to build a community oriented by the "other" in a multicultural and multidisciplinary environment. Global Connect seeks to understand the other as the way to order our love rightly. It confronts us with the truth that we cannot know ourselves or find rest if we only ever encounter reflections of our own image. True connection requires vulnerability, which involves stepping outside one's own "city" to encounter the story, the pain, and the hope of another.

In a world of hyperspecialization, we dare to unite what the world divides. By bringing together engineers, artists, philosophers, and policymakers from diverse cultures, we pursue a fuller understanding of truth—one that acknowledges that the deepest human questions cannot be answered by a single discipline. As my friend and co-founder Brian reflected, this mission echoes the call to "love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." He believes that to love our neighbor well, we must go beyond acquiring wisdom and knowledge to embrace what Proverbs urges: "In all your getting, get understanding." This understanding, he concludes, is fundamental to loving our neighbor as ourselves. (Proverbs 4:5-7).

The two streams of the Global Connect ecosystem offer university students and societal leaders a foretaste of what Augustine called the "heavenly city"—built on the love of God, which requires setting aside ego, preconceptions, and masks to be truly present—and an opportunity, as Brian puts it, to learn to “love our neighbor well”. This is the promise: restless hearts find communion, understanding, and rest within multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary communities where faithful followers of Christ grow together intellectually and spiritually.

february 25, 2026