giovedì 21 Novembre 2024
And if tomorrow, and I stress if...Coronavirus and the ultimate reduced liberty

Coronavirus and the ultimate reduced liberty

Leggi l’articolo in italiano

We have been at home these days. Inside our seclusion units, we live moments of social isolation. These are necessarily moments that make us reflect on how the leaders we choose to represent us manage to act in a situation of extreme chaos and fight against an unknown enemy. Abstention from voting has never been so useless and cowardly. In countries that directly or indirectly elected populist leaders, these citizens are left to the responsibility of government officials who deceive and deceive their citizens in a selfish perspective of not suffering a recession, and being able to lose in the polls of the next elections.

Threatened to answer in the Hague court regarding a crime against humanity, Bolsonaro represents this criminal and demented person who insists on contradicting the WHO indications, taking hundreds of thousands of lives to death for irresponsibility in the act of social and human governance.

The right of access to freedom is today, something that we illusively felt we could still have. It started in the middle of the last century, after the great world wars and at a time when the public discussion about the excess of industrialization, the consumer society and the effects on the environment on a planet that began to show signs of fatigue began. The great hippie demonstrations and the movements for the affirmation of freedom in the woodstocks of the 60s that vibrated all over the world, vociferating social movements that cloistered in ecological communities and barefoot apologists, or the “Barefoot society”, claiming to be sustainable communities in defending the environmental balances free of that capitalism that we knew we didn’t need.

The idea of freeing that consumption is associated with a certain material detachment that I did not need to consume in order to be in mental balance with the world. The waves of yoga and meditation that then began to vibrate in the world, coming from Buddhist and Hindu communities, where Europeans began to find new forms of balance away from the traditional paleo-Christian faith that was already on the decline. A reflection of this was even a new form of city architecture, based on abode and mud houses that constituted communities that followed their very own social rules. The struggle for sustainable or regenerative balance that the world so badly needs could be that last access to freedom, that of the intellect, of opinion.

The freedom we so badly need and which will certainly be called into question in a world with 3 billion inhabitants, is the last stronghold that Western society still has the privilege to think it has. In accessing online banking and social digitization, no one is free to act in geography, social context, consumption choices without being identified in their buying habits, manipulated with marketing maneuvers and harassed in their moral values by brands and pseudo ideas of material success that capitalist society imposes on us.

It turns out that the biometric collection that we still resist to accept as a form of social, sanitary and legal control here in the west, is the salvation for the crisis of the corona virus in the east, and that identification and connection of the individual’s profile, to his residence may have been the reason this outbreak was stopped so quickly in South Korea and China. The ultimate access to freedom is the false idea that we owned our destiny and that we were able to decide where we were going, how we were going and who we were with. From now on, that freedom is restricted to thought only.

It is no longer possible to act at the expense of the security of risk groups, risky places and choices that could jeopardize global security. The differentiation of individuals and this freedom will increasingly be the intellectual response that each one of us assumes for his social choices, and the only one today, towards humanity, being probably the last freehold of the human being, the intellect . It is likely that in confrontation with a limited experience of survival, imprisoned in our own homes, exposed to the pain of the loss of affection, it is possible to awaken to the need for education of a generation that has moved away from power, social decisions and their responsibility for the consequences of the whole so that this freedom has to be conquered again when we all think it has been guaranteed.

A new section

Among the many doubts that plague my mind, just like yours these days, I have only one certainty: when we return to everyday life, nothing will be the same as before. We are facing a challenge that is reductive to call it organizational, it is a philosophical challenge, it is the vision of the world that will change and on which we will have to build the new. And if tomorrow... and I stress "if" is a new column (the title is taken from the verses of a song very popular in Italy) that is open to contributions from intellectuals, scientists, artists, from all over Europe. Follow us and send us your impressions which we will publish periodically with the intention of creating an anthology of ideas.

Giampaolo Sodano

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