The war: a new meaning

I have wanted to write about this subject for some time. One of the reasons is that war has become omnipresent in our lives. And here I am speaking only about the kind of war in which weapons of combat are treated as the ultimate and legitimate method of resolving conflict.

Whether it erupts in Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Cuba, Venezuela, Antarctica, the Moon, or anywhere else humanity believes it can claim rights, the same conclusion keeps forcing itself upon us: we are still primates. We remain deeply attached to immediate satisfactions, to impulses dressed up as principles, and we seem incapable of fully seeing, let alone truly understanding, the scale of the destruction we cause—human lives lost, animal lives extinguished, ecosystems damaged or shattered, and a global imbalance produced by the simple fact that we refuse to share the world with one another.

I will try to develop these ideas further, although what I am saying may sound almost obvious—simple, logical, even banal. And yet this very banality is perhaps the clearest proof of how little humanity has truly evolved. We can formulate these truths easily, we can repeat them endlessly, but we still fail to live by them.

Many times, I try to imagine humanity as something capable of developing linearly, over thousands of years, toward a higher form of existence. I try to imagine directions that would allow us not merely to survive, but to live in a better world and to leave behind a better future for everyone. A future built not only on intelligence, but on restraint, responsibility, and the capacity to understand limits.

Is such a thing possible? Honestly, under present conditions, it seems entirely unreal to me. I no longer see linear development, but rather a progressive involution: a civilization that grows in power while shrinking in wisdom, that multiplies its means while impoverishing its ends.

And I say this because we show, again and again, that we do not understand what is happening to the Earth that makes our lives possible. Strictly speaking, we are not destroying the Earth itself; the Earth will outlast us. What we are destroying is the human world: the fragile balance that allows society, civilization, and meaning to exist in a livable form.

The Earth is almost 4.5 billion years old, while thinking man is only about 300,000 years old. Human beings began organizing themselves into societies roughly 10,000 years ago, and their absolute supremacy arrived only about 300 years ago, through the industrial revolution.

So the proportions are striking: the Earth carries an experience immeasurably older than ours; it took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to become dominant on this planet; and yet in only three centuries of technological acceleration, we have managed to destabilize the broader development of living ecosystems on Earth. That contrast alone should humble us. Instead, it seems only to make us more arrogant.

If we take seriously the exponential force contained in this process, the conclusion is unsettling. Mathematically, symbolically, even morally, it becomes easy to imagine how quickly such supremacy could vanish. In less than a year, humanity could lose its place at the top—not because the Earth would disappear, but because we would prove incapable of remaining worthy of that position.

Is it likely? Perhaps. Is it possible? Absolutely.

Is this ideal realistic?

Unlikely, for one simple reason: there are too many of us, and we are too divided.

Visions like this are becoming increasingly necessary because, little by little, each of us is beginning to understand that things are deteriorating rapidly. If we want a beautiful life, worthy of this world of technological progress, then we must keep our eyes on the true goal: development beyond our planet, not the destruction of one another.

When temperatures reach 50 degrees in places where they were 30 just 10 years ago, and in less than 5 years the sun will scorch everything even more mercilessly, what will it matter which nation is the most powerful? When all the peoples of the Earth are suffering, power will mean nothing. What will matter then is survival — the very principle that governs the animal world: the survival of the fittest.

And yet, this proves once again that we have forgotten the essential lesson of our ancestors: civilizations grew through community, balance, and harmony, not through destruction. What empire still stands today, 4000 years after the first ones appeared in Mesopotamia? None. Is it not already obvious that the dreams of glory pursued by tyrannical leaders lead only to humanity’s imbalance and the loss of its direction?

But who can stop humanity’s disappearance from Earth? To search for salvation anywhere other than within humanity itself is a delusion that can only end in self-destruction. No one is watching over us to save us, to lift us when we fall, or to care for us when food runs out and governments can no longer control the situation. If we want to save ourselves, then we will have to do it ourselves.

And yet, across these 4000 years since the rise of the first empire, one essential quality seems to have vanished from the equation: courage. The courage to act. The courage to make radical but necessary decisions in order to restore balance to the world.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough about why I insist on the first empires and on their so-called “longevity”. I do it because today almost every leader of a major state is presented either as an imperialist or, at best, as “the sword of justice”. Nothing is more illusory than this, in a time when the deeper trend of humanity is towards total freedom. When that trend finally runs its course, there will probably be too little left of humanity—too fragmented, too exhausted—to build great empires again.

So, is it clear now why I speak about empires? Because they cannot last. Their very nature is to rise, to harden, and then to crumble, no matter how eternal they pretend to be.

Let’s clarify for a moment the idea of courage. Courage has always been the hidden engine that brings armed conflicts and historical crises to some kind of end: the courage to make wise decisions, or audacious decisions, or sometimes completely reckless ones. The battlefield, the revolution, the collapse of an empire—all are full of moments when someone, somewhere, decided to risk everything.

The thing about courage is that it is cultivated. It does not simply appear overnight as a stable personal trait, except perhaps as a sudden episode that often ends in disaster. In such moments, the decision is not made with clear eyes and true courage, but under the blind impulse of the moment. The famous “all or nothing” frequently leads to destruction.

True courage is cultivated. It is a quality that grows inside you, a muscle that forms slowly, by having heroes. By having figures—real or fictional—against whom you can measure yourself, from whom you can borrow an example. Through them you learn to endure fear without being ruled by it, to accept risk without worshipping it.

But even these idols are disappearing. They become rarer, blurred, everything turns amorphous. We live in a world where the moral compass has been lost, where we wander aimlessly down the wide boulevard called “we must be tolerant”, repeating formulas we barely understand. The only war in which we participate is the war of statements posted online.

We no longer take to the streets, we no longer demand anything with our fists raised and our faces visible. Instead, we wait quietly for likes to drip onto our comments, written under the shameless declarations of those who play with our future. Our courage has been outsourced to the screen: we shout in capital letters, we share, we react—but our legs stay at home, our voices stay in our throats, and the empire, any empire, knows very well that it has nothing to fear from a people that only fights with its thumbs.