A friend told me he’s getting ready to move to Antarctica. After a first shock due to perplexity together with wonder I started considering that our planet is done, even if the Western model considers it as never-ending.
In the last few decades, many intellectuals have prophesied the death of the West. But to move on, we need to understand what really died in our civilization in order to get rid of it and leave room for something new.
It is dead is the twentieth century dream of well-fare widespread in the materialistic society.
The idea of a constant growth is over because it’s actually a Chain Letter: a growth based on finance, on doping, sooner or later reaches a point where growth is no longer possible. The main limit that we are seeing already now is that the natural resources are not endless and moreover have increasing costs to source them.
A civilization at its end is crashing with more backward economies, which are developing following a model that we have already analyzed and that we are realizing that it is unsustainable for the planet.
What would be needed would be a step forward, a change in a new dimension. Maybe what is dead in our society is the idea of being human which represented it: The idea that the goal of a society is to guarantee the safety and well-fare of everyone, as the scope of life would be to live more relaxed and for as long as possible.
By seeking this social goal, we have forgotten the “full dimension” of life, and we have lost the spiritual component and the highly subjective component of life evolution. Perhaps the revolution of the entire human civilization could start again from the role and the goals of each of us.
This is to avoid finding ourselves like Schakleton’s crew, wandering desperate looking for nothing in the ice desert of Antarctica.
LAURA MALTAGLIATI
(Original article By Andrea Zoppolato & Duilio Forte)
