News
- 14.09.2011
Ethics at the center of the new future
A realistic account of the crisis suggests that, to get out, will not be enough to field new technical solutions, or even necessary to establish new rules governing the market.Rethinking the hitherto dominant paradigm, and that has reduced the economic logic to the rational calculation to a mere realpolitik and political demands to focus on a third aspect of the crisis, which in my opinion is the decisive one and that weighs perhaps more of structural weakness of our economic and political systems. I refer to that sort of cultural paralysis that the crisis has highlighted the one hand and the other helped to accentuate, and which manifests itself in some attitudes become quite widespread in many European societies: I think the low tendency to plan for the future, the prevalence ties revocable at the expense of stable relationships, need to be interpreted as being the exclusive right to satisfy through consumption.
The post, far greater results that will be able to achieve economic systems, has been well highlighted by Benedict XVI in his recent visit to Venice: "As part of a city, whatever it is, even the choices of an administrative nature cultural and economic development depends, basically, from this fundamental orientation, which we call "political" in its most noble and highest of the term. It is a choice between one town and "liquid", home to a culture that increasingly appears that the relative and ephemeral, and a city that constantly renews its beauty by drawing from the sources of the art charity, knowledge, relationships between men and between peoples. "
Spread the reason, therefore, means first of all answer the question about who - and who wants to be - the human subject and what the nature of their needs. According to the representation of the Hobbesian state of nature, which in some ways epitomizes the modern conception of human beings, the only need of man is indeed the survival and his only object of desire is the power as a means to satisfy their need.
Since all act according to that motive, conflict is inevitable. This conception, variously reformulated, is that which in fact refers, more or less consciously, but classical economics with the model of homo economicus, which still has a strong weight in regulating the world of production and consumption. It is a vision not only unrealistic but also ideological because it transforms the man in a lonely and conflicted actor of the market and a subject isolated and docile state. On the contrary, man is a being originally in-relation, is a self-in-relation. He also stated, however, Adam Smith, father of modern economics.