What if we raised a child to believe the world was like a fairytale: populated by dragons, with clouds made of cotton candy and trees ready to hand out ice cream in exchange for water and honey?
A child raised in such a way would build a vivid expectation of what awaited them—especially if they also lived in a play-park style house, filled with replicas of those dragons, clouds, and trees.
And how many would still defend that vision when, after a long journey, that child—now grown—faced a very different reality, blaming disappointment not on the fairytale itself but on a wrong choice of paths?
Looking at our society, the condition in which much of humanity finds itself is not so far from that of such an adult raised on bread and fairytales.
But where does this tendency to see the world this way come from?
With the introduction of the mechanistic worldview—about four centuries ago—and its deep influence on every field of knowledge, we began to live in a sort of “toyland” in how we imagined the planet.
As we discovered the laws that govern the universe, and in response to the Church’s dogmatic obscurantism, we asserted our autonomy as sentient beings, freeing ourselves from the dictates of faith.
But we got carried away. Without realizing it, we found ourselves on the comforting shores of another faith: faith in the infinity of our productive powers, supported by a planet imagined as an inexhaustible treasure chest of resources.
If the mechanistic paradigm is one of the two “parents” who raised the child on fairytales—and thinking of the human being as nothing more than a “product-consuming machine” with infinite needs is, after all, a rather sad fairytale—the other parent is the capitalist market system, which continues to defend that distorted image even when the adult collides with reality.
Despite the capitalist edifice having shown its cracks time and again—including the current crisis of national economies—it seems economists, the new “gurus” of this faith, refuse to admit that the problem does not lie in regulating or deregulating markets, but in the very foundations of the system.
Foundations which, to borrow from Shakespeare, are “made of the same stuff as dreams.”
And so we keep telling ourselves our fairytale, defending it with phrases like:
“No, my child. Keep searching: dragons exist. Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong places. Maybe it’s too hard alone. Convince your friends, and together you’ll find them.”
That most economists, by training, fail to integrate into their calculations the conditions nature imposes on every human activity might not be a problem… were it not for the fact that they are precisely the “high priests” chosen by governments as advisers.
And they—and we—intoxicated by the abundance of goods produced in the last century, now, like children afraid of losing their toys, struggle to open our eyes and recognize that perhaps it is those very toys that have taken much away from us.
Rude awakenings are never pleasant, especially when one is dreaming of something delightful.
And it is undeniable that for us—the part of the world that has tasted the sweetest fruits of capitalism—that system has been, and still is, a room full of comforts.
But as suggested in the documentary The Corporation (Achbar, Abbott, Bakan – 2003), we should be careful not to mistake the rush of speed and the air whipping against our faces for the experience of flight, when in truth it is a rapid fall toward a ruinous crash with the ground.
I do not intend to present capitalism as absolute evil.
Throughout human history, periods have come and gone—and will continue to come and go—in which worldviews, lifestyles, and social models are tested. These are natural, formative stages in humanity’s overall journey.
The point is that, while recognizing the original intention of building widespread well-being, the time has come to look at what surrounds us as it truly is—not with the enchanted gaze of childhood.
We have the ability to recognize reality’s signals in time, before the violent impact of our “solid dreams” smashes us against the ground.
A. Gramsci Anthropology Community Culture Ecology Economy Francis Bacon Giorgio Nebbia H. D. Thoreau Ivan Illich Jacques Ellul Jeremy Rifkin Mark Fisher Meccanicismo Noam Chomsky Pensiero Cristiano Perception PIL Planetary Boundaries Politics Health Serge Latouche Time
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