I find myself wondering if really the society that man has built and is building, the technology he has developed, the answers of science, the law that protects us ... I wonder if really the wild life in the jungle is more cruel . Perhaps it is inherent in some men, that thought that creeps in and constantly suggests the echo of the so-called "golden age", but reading the newspapers, listening to the news, trying to understand why politics is so complicated since be made "on a human scale" - and certainly the average man (but I doubt that even politicians talk like that, in the absence of their lawyers ...) says so - it's hard to believe that an existence should in which it is clear in mind who to escape and who to trust (run away from the lion, caress the rabbit) is so terribly aberrant, compared to a society where you have everything you want, but a huge restlessness and the rotten blood.
Yes of course, if I woke up tomorrow in the midst of brambles and brushwood and had to run away from the hungry lion, I would be dead in less than half a minute, and surely having to pick berries to feed myself I would regret any supermarket.
But, here, I am not trying to say that man is demonic in nature or that progress is negative. I am only expressing my personal personal in realizing that this jungle we are in now is terrifying: an incomprehensible politics in which we, poor game, cannot understand the mechanisms or even glimpse them, a society that makes us stressed even on vacation , a collective anxiety, information that becomes a collective forum of opinions, subjectivity that becomes law, if you have enough power to buy a few journalists and have the right connections. Values become the object of ridicule and bullying, of the psychological one, of the slightly bad one. The believer becomes a bigot, "health-conscious" is almost a negative term, women are whores or puritans, drugs are a common good, the mafia is our neighbor, we eat antibiotics directly in the meat of the supermarket.
I'm allowed to doubt progress, but I'm not shocking enough to consider only one side of the coin.
What scares me is the human mind, the culture. it has always managed to survive: the inquisition, the censorship, the world wars. Even in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, the culture survived.
Will it survive the internet? Will he survive a world so hectic, so fast, so cruel, so ambiguous? to a jungle with rules expressed in decrees? If wikipedia tomorrow said that Napoleon never existed, that man is actually a bird, that gravity allows us to change color.
culture can really survive all of this, as the holders of classical music go to war with each other and are beaten by any pianist, writers scramble their strenuous writings to the most, beaten by teenage novels that will appear as best seller next to anna karenina and the leopard, painters and sculptors are ignored because the guy who ties a dog in a museum or who places himself as a sculpture is more "audience" and art critics talk about it more.
I am concerned about the voice of humanity: is it strong enough to withstand even this silent war? Or is this not a war, and this oppression, this anguish, this evil of living will remain a worldwide constant, and only a few will come out of it, like crazy astronauts?
The world was so beautiful, full of animals, plants, clear waters, birds and everything was clean, clear, wonderful. Then man came and started hunting, logging, fishing, building factories, polluting, destroying. Man has a large, efficient brain but in his existence he has proved to be very stupid because in a few centuries he has made many animals extinct and has destroyed the environment not only his but of many species that are now also in danger of extinction.
Can we still say that man is intelligent? The only race capable of self-destruction. This is indeed what is happening. Not an implacable God, not an insane nature, not a set of ineluctable and unpredictable circumstances. No, simply a continuous series of actions and dull choices dictated by the anxiety of power and greed. This is what is changing the planet we live on and which, sooner or later, will no longer bear the weight of so much madness.
More than 1.5 billion disposable masks ended up in the oceans and seas of the world in 2020. A figure that should alarm everyone, showing when our new habits have a highly negative impact on the environment. Moreover, a problem that will not be solved in the short time, since a mask takes around 450 years to decompose.
Plastic was perhaps the most relevant technological discovery since the age of metals. Even the most polluting. But the fault lies not with plastic, argue the large multinationals that produce it and use it instead of pure possible alternatives. The fault lies with the end users (i.e. consumers) who do not recycle completely and correctly. And we could almost almost agree with them if there were no doubts: but how did we manage to survive before? Yet we were reasonably happy and we were certainly not in the Middle Ages, given that modern plastics have been synthesized for just over half a century.
The problem is that plastics would be made to last forever, but they are used to make objects that, on the other hand, are only used once.
There are certain nights I would like to go out. Go to the seashore, lie down and look at the stars. Nothing more peaceful to purify the soul and mind. But anyone who has been in pain so great that they cry to no more tears knows well that at some point there is a kind of quiet melancholy, a kind of calm, almost certain that nothing will happen again.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 