Homo eticus ɶcominicus

Economics, happyness and value

Tullio Chiminazzo

• Publisher: Armando Editore
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9791259842688
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

With "Ethics and Economy" people and nature will be at the center of any economic plan and the numerous alternatives to the Classical Economy, born in the last thirty years, will find "Common home" in the new discipline. The three production factors will increase to seven economic factors and all market operators will have to take into account economic sustainability, environmental and social. Corporate social responsibility will be affirmed and homo ?conomicus will be replaced by homo ethicus ?conomicus. Digital and green are the tools for sustainable development in the coming years and new forms of financing will be required for young people, including from developing countries, to achieve greater distribution of means of production and, at the same time, a new holding company. Young people, as well as researchers, will increasingly become job creators and the cultural perspectives of the entire society will expand, starting with children, so that they can more appropriately face a dynamic and ever-changing world.

1. Looking inside and around ourselves to understand the world

This first chapter takes a glance at the past to help us understand the present. In making my principal points, I shall try to adopt the criteria of transparency and simplicity. If we allow ourselves to be guided by a more childlike world-view, we shall be better equipped to identify the problems of our age, namely the financial system, a tendency towards rent-seeking and the human greed that makes it more tempting to earn a living by speculation than by work.

The uncertainty of the current age raises many doubts in our minds. This was not the case until recently, at least for me and people of my age. We had much more security and peace of mind. But we all know that security and peace of mind cannot be bought, because they are manifestations of the spirit, and qualities that we find or seek in our relationships with others and by delving into our own past. And this past, in turn, becomes present, giving us the chance to approach our future more effectively.

What earth-shattering developments have made us feel that the relationship between the generations has been broken?

Why have we lost our way and why do we feel lonelier and more defenceless than we used to?

There have always been opposing positions and different interpretations, but these days you have to take care to use politically correct language to avoid being attacked and sucked relentlessly into the vortex of pointless, counter-productive arguments. There are people who study and use their intelligence for the sole purpose of looking for contradictions in others and focusing on nothing but their weaknesses. These people aim only to inflict maximum damage on their perceived opponents, and to denigrate their thinking, their projects and what they hold to be true and right, by trying to make them look totally wrong.

But it does not matter much, because every coin has two sides, and every one of us can now become a key player in an episode of history that we can tell our children and grandchildren about, leaving them free to draw their own conclusions and build their own stories.

So instead of concentrating exclusively on the negatives, we need to extend our focus to the positive and beautiful things that every civilisation can represent. We just need the ability to read the past simply, live the present coherently and embrace the future serenely, using the tools that human evolution is now making available to everyone.

The path I hope to trace with these reflections is arduous but engaging. It is a vision involving the commitment to understand and act accordingly, with the aid of greater transparency and the determination to simplify, for ourselves and others. These are not empty expressions but represent a practical course of action that helps us, and will perhaps make us realise how vital it is to do everything we can to become a bit more child-like.

The adult-child is the horizon of this work, helped, as children are, by play and technological evolution. And, as it ventures into “virtual reality”, technology will be a step forward for humanity only if it enables us to live our existential reality more coherently.

1.1 Transparency and simplification

In 2020, I set myself the goal – in both my professional life and my interpersonal relationships – of achieving the greatest possible transparency, and simplifying all processes and activities as best I could, both for myself and everyone I interact with.

Transparency enhances peace of mind because it obviates the need to disguise our true selves with manufactured appearances and deploy self-defence mechanisms in our dealings with others.

Simplification enables us to live more freely and create fewer obstacles to the freedom of others. The exact opposite of simplification is complication, which immediately puts us in mind of the loathed excesses of bureaucracy that we usually come up against in our dealings with institutions. In other words, when we are obliged to deal with those “nameless” people who operate behind the mask of organisational anonymity.

There is no question that organisations and institutions are absolutely essential, but what is questionable, is the degradation to which we are now all accustomed, in the form of everyday abdication from as many acts of responsibility as possible.

We are living in an age in which the act of taking responsibility is becoming increasingly rare, not only on the social level, where important decision-making is required, but also on every level of daily coexistence.

The consequences of this are plain to see, but since any attempt to make the world a better place has to start from each of us as individuals, let us make our task easier by practising the art of simplification. It is a natural gesture with the potential to yield unimaginable benefits, and can make life much more enjoyable.

Transparency and simplification are also a common thread of this book, in which I will do everything in my power to translate concepts that might seem complicated at first sight into clearly comprehensible form. This will give more coherence to my recurring focus on the world of children, which mirrors the horizon to which I would like to remain faithful.

1.2 The great reset behind the re-start

I recently got the chance to see a short film called “The Great Reset”, whose thesis runs something like this: money can be transformed into an IT platform on which the players in the real economy – producers, distributors and consumers – interact without having the fruits of their labours stolen by the financial and monetary system.

The reflection that emerged from this, I hate to say, is that many of us avoid making the effort to improve living conditions and thereby fail in our duty to improve society as a whole. Very few people these days want to make personal choices that contribute to changing the current financial system. Many, in fact, would prefer to play for the “smart” team, alongside those who think of nothing other than their own personal gain. Speculation, involving the minimum possible effort, challenge and exertion of talent, has now gained the upper hand. The result is that the often anonymous financial and monetary system attracts vast numbers of investors who are unwary to one degree or another. Furthermore, there is widespread admiration for people who get rich through the financial system, and everyone wants to emulate them so as to make more and more money, without working.

This decadence has occurred on such a scale that these “smart” people have become the new role models.

Sooner or later we need to talk about the true joy that quenches the human thirst, because it is only by rediscovering love for others – whether near, far, friend, relative or even enemy – that people can improve themselves, their lives and the lives of everyone they come into contact with.

Why do I mention love? Because love enables people to go back to capturing the best moments in life as an expression of the correct use of their talents. The true spirit of man is nourished by love.

If you are unable to savour the successes and disappointments of your work, and your relationship with the world, poverty, beauty and goodness, you have already lost your humanity. You cannot be happy, merely rewarded by those little things that look like everything to you, and can always be bought with money and power.

Every so often I get the chance to talk to a wise writer friend of mine, and on those occasions we remember how many incredible moments we have had the chance to experience together since we met. We have worked, suffered, rejoiced, studied, exchanged ideas and a whole lot more. But now, we are sad to see how the natural tempo for acting, planning, inventing and living has been superseded by a “cybernetic” tempo. We are obliged to acknowledge that the rhythm between man and nature has been broken beyond repair.

With her usual determination, she tells me: “We weren’t created to think and operate like machines. Technology is destroying our generation too: in this inexorably fast-moving world, the only people who will feel at home are perhaps children of pre-school age now.” A Milan-based psychiatrist friend of hers, who – in collaboration with a professor at a well-known clinic – is studying the reactions of younger people’s brains compared with those of older people, explained to her that the most exercised region of the brain in the current generation is different from the one most exercised in earlier generations. The region used by the latter is atrophying in younger brains, because it is accustomed to much slower “reading” times than those that apply on the internet. Instead, another region of the brain, with different characteristics, capable of expressing and swallowing high-speed messages, is being activated.

And then she tells me: “Anyone who wants to do anything will have to adapt to the new tools, and soon probably also to new ways of expressing themselves. Books will perhaps disappear and everything you want to know, you’ll find on the internet, in a matter of seconds. You’ll free up space at home by getting rid of your bookshelves, armchair, glasses, book and the cushion behind your back. All we’ll need is a latest-generation connected wristwatch and we’ll be able to surf the web, go around the world, read everything, say everything, and keep up to date instantly. Conditioning will shape our choices, our tastes and our own free will. Homo sapiens will be relegated to the status of some kind of robot, totally controlled by the “programme” generated by an immense server-farm the size of a mega-city, somewhere in China, which will slyly send us a constant stream of messages. Every one of us, since we’ll all have at least one electronic device, until they implant us with an ID chip under the skin at birth, will be tracked every moment of our lives, and conditioned by subliminal messages. In short, we’ll be nothing more than puppets, doing whatever the puppet-master of the day sees fit.”

Is that really how things will be? We do not know, but we can be sure there is no turning back.

Going back to the “The Great Reset” and the web gossip about the idea that Covid-19 was deliberately unleashed on ordinary people, views have even been expressed about the intervention of top corporate bosses, virtual currencies, etc. To start again from scratch we would first have to wipe the slate totally clean!

A few months ago, we exchanged some news and explanations about Bitcoin, without either of us being surprised by what emerged, because the problem, in any event, is always...

Table of contents

• Book title page
• Dedication
• Preface by Loredana Reppucci Ales
• Introduction
• 1. Looking inside and around ourselves to understand the world
• 2. What we need to do and how we need to behave
• 3. Integral human development. Why is Ethics and Economics the new discipline for the 21st century?
• 4. The road is long: others must complete the journey
• Conclusion
• Postface
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Synopsis - Biography
• Rights