Tag: philosophy

There is always something very positive about these extreme and unavoidable situations that force a decision to be made. First of all, they reveal courage and cowardice in the face of the need to decide; then, and above all, the priorities, which if they were masked before for whatever reason, can now no longer be camouflaged, and the previous cunning or indecision suddenly disappear, taking the place of an unequivocal and unavoidable choice that is imposed, foreshadowing the consequences it will entail.

Nothing is more destructive to the conscience than the daily practice of a meaningless act, the consequences of which are not experienced by the person who carried it out. The resulting detachment from reality is so extreme that it ends up annulling the notion of the individual, also annulling morality and the possibility of evolution. If one does not recognize oneself, one does not recognize the other, one does not recognize the past, one does not recognize life. The need to live therefore disappears.

No virtue can flourish without this strange, instinctive feeling of duty and responsibility that conscience always makes a point of expressing. Curiously, modernity, by massifying man, making him live in ever more populous cities, providing him with ever smaller spaces and tasks, has not only annulled this feeling, but transformed it into one of insignificance. Modern man lives in a space he did not conquer, in a house he did not build, spending his life on tasks whose real purpose, if he does not ignore it, is devoid of his personal stamp. One cannot accept charges for what one experiences as disconnection.

Faced with the possibility of near death, the average man collapses in terror and begins to behave like a primate. In other words: fear overrides his reason and makes him look like a child. For this reason and others, the fear of death is the first to be overcome and it is the fear that frees, stimulates and hardens the spirit. To overcome it is to transform oneself and, in a way, to overcome all other fears.