"Know thyself"

Know yourself and be aware of your limits: this is one of the classical interpretations of the maxim that, it is said, was inscribed on the temple of Apollo in Delphi.

Thousands of years have passed, and yet this warning not to underestimate one's attitudes and inclinations has also recently come to mind, during the last "competitive" event organized by the ink multinational Sun Chemical *. So much so that, now, I can safely admit that I did not do my best to be among the best and thus win the prize offered.

I had neither the ability nor the desire to do so, because I was clearly aware that in the event... I would have risked seeing my fear change into terror and astonishment: in fact, driving a Ferrari racing car along a racetrack is one thing, a day of flying with the civil acrobatic team is quite another.
It was a hard-fought but by no means reckless race, bearing well in mind that "there is nothing that throws us more into danger than the heedless craving to subtract ourselves from the very same".

A bit like what is happening today, in this new normality, where recognizing the threat we are exposed to despite ourselves should be exactly the opposite of being afraid of it.

Times in which we fear, as Leopardi writes in the Lonely Sparrow, that  “Each day become more full of misery".
In fact, these are days in which our relationships with others and the world are strongly conditioned by the emergency.

Our society is - indisputably and necessarily - the object of a general phenomenon of hospitalization: alas, "the Agora seems to have given way to the lazaret, the competitive spirit of agonism to agony", I reread with a shudder of empathy in a pre-covid article... Unfortunately, the alternative seems, for many people, to boil down to the choice between curing their depression or finding a new job.
In fact, in light of the values of efficiency and productivity to which we are obliged, many people risk social insignificance, as well as an identity crisis.

The sense of vulnerability has become stronger and stronger, standardizing individuals in the way they feel and by increasing the need for protection by someone who accompanies them in their daily life (save out of ignorance confusing the very different responsibilities of the Government and the Regions, for example, in terms of healthcare).
We appear like children, the object of exaggerated love, hitherto spared from evils, tragedies, mourning, making us unprepared for reality when it affects us personally, and indifferent when such negative events affect others.

Are we still able to distinguish what is good and right, what is true and beautiful, from what is economically useful? Have we ever been able to do so?
On the other hand, whether we like it or not, it is precisely in uncertainty and precariousness that a new story can be born; a new story, perhaps, in which the feeling of participation is equal to the greatness of today's world, in which man reappropriates love, suffering, imagination, dreams, in short, his humanity.

Jung wrote «The psychology of the individual corresponds (...) to the psychology of nations. What nations do, every single person does, and as long as the individual does it, the nation does it too. Only in the change in the mentality of the individual lies the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation. The great problems of humanity were never solved by great laws, but only by changing the mentality of the individual» (1)..

Spes ultima dea! [Hope is the last goddess!]