It is surprising that traveling around the planet, one meets very few people who are satisfied with the place and time they live. We have managed to lengthen existence, to increase the population tenfold, to make scientific discoveries and build surprising works, to conceive great artistic masterpieces, to explore atoms and planets with equal precision.
But there is no progress without happiness, and the world is not happy because it oscillates between disorientation and fear, wondering why such frequent wars have been unleashed, generated so much pain, persecuted minorities, created poverty, exploited children, tortured prisoners, handed over power to the incapable, destroyed a lot of the environment.
Depressed and disoriented, we stopped planning our future, limiting ourselves to waiting for it and projecting our negativity onto future generations as well.
Probably the impasse in which we find ourselves derives from the fact that the current post-industrial society was not born on the basis of a pre-existing model, an already elaborated and shared paradigm.
This was not the case for many previous companies. The medieval one, for example, was born from the Christian model that inspired the city of man to the city of God. In the eighteenth century, in full royal absolutism and full religious inquisition, a few dozen intellectuals of the Enlightenment dared to develop and propose a model of “bourgeois society. “Based on reason, freedom, secularism, and equality, facing persecution, imprisonment and, in many cases, even death. Social democracies were born on the basis of the model pioneered by Robert Owen and theorized by Eduard Bernstein. Soviet society was born on the model conceived by Karl Marx and developed by Lenin. Finally, a large part of humanity has imitated the American model, but, now that this ideal is also undergoing a crisis, to achieve serenity a new life project would be needed, capable of indicating the goal and path to progress that, without rules and outlets, it appears increasingly difficult, almost senseless.
A new model is not born by chance, suddenly: it is born on the remains of all the previous ones and requires a serious effort of analysis, imagination, and concreteness, that is, of choral creativity. It would be necessary to patiently retrace the ideals already experienced in the course of human history to discard the obsolete part and distill the still fruitful juice.
It is a question of understanding the present in order to decipher the future, predict its trends, understand its fashions, risks, and opportunities. It is a question of understanding what will change in our individual and collective lives due to the transformations that will revolutionize technology, work, consumption, leisure time, ethics, aesthetics.
The comparison of behaviors and trends prevailing in different cultures will stimulate in us the development of a new model of life, adhering to new needs, finally able to free us from the crisis that inhabits us, accompanying us in a future that can be better… I don’t know if happy!!
