Politics and the Dream
The economy and politics do not work
For years the Economics Department of the European School of Economics, has been conducting studies on the origins of nations’ wealth and the factors that determine the competitive advantage, as well as the problems of economics development and the real causes of the endemic poverty in large areas of the planet.
The purpose of our research was to discover why the economy, like politics, does not work. The fight against backwardness and the poverty of underdeveloped populations , the complexity of systems, environmental pollution and crime in industrialised countries, seems without an escape route.
The wealth of nations
Nations’ wealth, their level of prosperity and wellbeing, the stability and maturity of their institutions, are the effects of the ways of thinking and feeling of man. The economy of a country is nothing other than the projection of their value system, ideas and principles.
To change our destiny, even economic or fnancial, we must therefore first change our inner vision . The system of moral values, ideas and principles in which we believe is the cause, and the economic events are the effect. This is true for a country, for an organisation, for a man as well as for a civilisation. So the true difference between nations is not created by the amount of wealth, which is nevertheless measured and is at best an effect, or by the availability or lack of natural or technological resources, but by the difference in their quality of ideas, the breadth of their way of thinking and feeling, by the depth of the system of moral values of those populations. In the same way the difference between men is not wealth, race or beliefs, but psychology.
Politics and conflicting thought
As with economics, politics is also the reflection of ordinary humanity’s psychology.
The world is a projection of our psychology.
A conflicting psychology guided by racial and territorial instincts, based on a predatory vision of the world, on a binary logic, dual, where opposition, contrast, antagonism and competition seem a permanent and indispensable part of man’s history. Politics is understood to be a factious activity based on selfishness and on the blind affirmation of one’s own interests and of those of one’s own group over others.
It will continue to exist while the majority of mankind is ruled by ill emotions,
that thinks and feels negatively.
Man is an incomplete project, an imprisoned being who believes to be free -a fragmented multitude who believes to be a unity. “ Man is a rope over an abyss stretched between the beast and the superman”, Nietzche realised. He dreaded an age in which mankind “will no longer point the arrow of his desires outside of man and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to vibrate”.
Ordinary psychology, which in our study we call horizontal, is that of a being that lacks internal unity, quick tempered, susceptible, internally agitated by a legion of emotions, thoughts and contrasting desires that pull in opposite directions and tear him apart, creating conflicts, divisions, crime and wars externally.
Politics is his mirror.
The vertical Man
What is at stake is more than just economics and politics, it is the future of the Homo Sapiens species. Birth and the establishment of a new man, gifted with a more evolved psychological system, is not an option but a condition of survival for all humanity.
Tracing the steps outside of the confines of the economy our research cut across the scientific domains of numerous other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and even ethology, the science that studies the behaviour and habits of animals.
Once we had identified it we called this new species: the vertical man. He has not evolved from the old humanity but he is an absolutely original being, gifted with a psychology free from interior conflicts and from the ballast of negative emotions.
His logic is not binary, his mind does not work for opposites, his spirit is not conflicted. He knows about the existence of levels, the rungs to which each thing belongs on the Ladder of being, and he sees the world through this order, this hierarchy, and not through the friction of opposites. Opposites are simply two sides of the same reality, like the two ends of one stick. Behind it is a hidden harmony, as Heraclitus already knew –Hierarchy is God.
The vertical man has an extra dimension.
His vantage point is from above. He is both the observer and the observed, the scientist and the guinea pig, the individual and the crowd, and as such he has a more complete psychology or, we could say, he belongs to a more intelligent species. Unifying and harmonising the opposites inside himself, he knows how to use external conflict as fuel for his evolution.
