A super intellectual friend, very familiar with philosophical thoughts, one day revealed to me that when he was young, he had been exactly the opposite.
He was an aggressive, violent person, a promoter of bullying techniques. But during his military service he met a bully who was twice his size and who reacted to his first provocation with a loud slap, turning him upside down.
From that day on, he decided to relate to others only on an intellectual level.
From the conquest by the homo sapiens of the European territories of the Neanderthal, the expansion of the Greeks in the Mediterranean and the example of Roman Empire until the military colonization of the West of the entire planet, the history of humanity has been a crescendo of expansion and conquests of new territories.
Until the twentieth century the expansion has always been territorial and based on military force. Since the last century it has been transformed into an economic conquest achieved through commercial products and financial instruments.
Maybe we have reached the very first stalemate in the history of humanity because we have realized that geographically nothing remains, apart some strip of forest and Antarctica.
The same process, which took place in the colonial era, is also happening from the economical point of view nowadays: that is when the conquered territories have developed so far as to affirm their autonomy from the invader.
Emerging countries, that had been economically colonized, today they can go it alone, trying to replicate the Western model by competing on equal terms.
This innate desire for expansion is more and more shifting ideological level, by claiming to have a supremacy and domination right, which is no longer motivated by military or economic strength but by a so-called cultural superiority.
The problem is that, in this case, it is only a presumed superiority, which looks like more a teenage bullying than a philosophical or scientific thinking.
As in bullying situation we try to impose our worldview on others, but in case of lack of strength, every act of bullying ends in opposite effect.
To avoid receiving a loud slap, perhaps the West should better focus on the development of thought and knowledge, not on power.
LAURA MALTAGLIATI
(Original article By Andrea Zoppolato & Duilio Forte)
