Benvenuti nel realismo capitalista! Competition contro cooperazione

Abstract

That unexpected event that was and is the coronavirus, among the many things to think about, there is at least two that deserve to be remembered here:

1. a) there is a substantial difference between the idea of freedom understood as an individualistic and self-centered way of living the relationship with others and the idea according to which the freedom of each finds its limit in the freedom of the other; b) only the prevailing of the sense of cooperation over that of competition could limit the damage and give us some prospect of escaping from the tunnel of contagion and death. Individualism and competition have made the happiness of those who got rich and are getting rich on those who are paying and will pay with their life, with unemployment, with poverty. Freedom can go hand in hand with equality only if it includes in itself the sense of limit, self-limitation, as when two children, but also two adults play and know they have to follow the rules for the game to be. But to keep to the rules they must know how to limit themselves. With freedom as a sense of limitation and with equality as an essential basis for diversity, it makes sense to speak of the common good, of the environment, of work, of school. And of change whose reality and concreteness must correspond or at least refer to principles.