Of Roberto Pecchioli
Source: Heretically
The British government established the Ministry of Loneliness. The proud empire that belonged to Queen Victoria and the East India Company raises the white flag. Old England was the first homeland of individualism, from Locke to Hume passing through Bentham's utilitarianism and the economics of the Scots, Smith e Mandeville. Before them, Thomas Hobbes theorized that homo homini lupus, therefore it must be kept in check quickly by iron-clad governments. Theresa May, British Prime Minister, perhaps out of feminine sensitivity, he captured something profound: the present time, in the West, it is that of disintegration, of depression, of loneliness.
We believe that the decision is the most sensational admission of defeat made by a political system, economic and social. Loneliness, in the United Kingdom, it captures at least ten million subjects, one sixth of the population and is certainly one of the main causes of alcoholism, of addictions, of depression, of suicides. It seems more widespread among the middle classes than among the very poor, but it is nothing more than the natural outcome of a way of life – individualism, career pursuit, success, money – which inevitably distances one from others. If for Aristotle, man was a social animal, or politician, whose realization occurred in the concreteness of the polis, for the postmodern Westerner, Max Stirner's dramatic conviction applies: the One. According to the German thinker of the Hegelian left, the only way to save man from every form of political slavery, cultural or religious consists in exalting it as an absolute value. The individual becomes the Unique, whose task is to appropriate only one, authentic ownership, himself.
We might remember it as the Protestantism of Northern Europe and Great Britain, in the form of the radical Anglicanism of the Puritans, arrives at the same conclusions through different paths, with man alone before the mystery of everything, paroxystically engaged in the vita activa to demonstrate to himself that he possesses grace. The consequence, forgotten every reference to transcendence, it is the loneliness following the unleashing of human passions. Read More
Of Matthew Castagna
