Every birth of a free person reminds us that a world different from the one wanted by the powers that be is still possible
How did 2020 go? To this question I often receive the answer “sh*t” but, not infrequently, also the following: “I’m a bit ashamed to say it, for me it was a great year”. We all agree that it was a year of great ferment, which turned our lives upside down. To find such radical changes in humanity’s lifestyle in history we must go back at least seventy years, namely to the Second World War. All of us have lost an enormous amount of certainties, which then actually, if we think about it carefully, never existed. Those who took enormous advantage of this global health crisis were always them: the large Silicon Valley corporations and the richest people in the world who further increased their wealth. Even amongst ordinary people some found themselves, fortunately, taking unexpected advantages from this situation or, simply, in this dreadful year some had a gift from life, such as for example the birth of a child, which cancelled out all the negative. Many introduced positive changes into their lives, such as for example getting closer to nature and a less artificial world, self-producing their own food, educating their children more appropriately, taking care of their body, reuniting with friends and acquaintances in an intentional community. Others proactively reinvented themselves knowing how to seize the opportunities that every crisis opens in economic, political, social, intellectual terms. Unfortunately most people, as spectators, remained imprisoned in the trap of terror and fear, waiting to be saved.
The transition
Coincidental or not, what we are experiencing is a great transition or reset, as someone has called it. The technological and digital revolution made an enormous leap in 2020 and companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, demonstrated in a blatant manner how pervasive and decisive their role is, above democracies and peoples.
Thanks to the pandemic, even the generations that were less inclined to online shopping, video calls and chats, have become great users of digital services.
Now almost everyone is ready for the invasion of the Internet of Things that awaits us with 5G, of robots, of self-driving cars, of telemedicine, of algorithms determining our purchasing choices, directing our desires, mapping our habits, making us desire a future designed for us by neuromarketing research: the virtualisation of life, of experiences and of being is already reality. Peoples controlled by a technocratic oligarchy in an Orwellian world are no longer an apocalyptic scenario but the reality we have before our eyes.
The technological drift
Open source and its great ideals have lost the battle to the advantage of a few corporations that operate beyond the market economy, beyond the rules of nations in a monopoly regime. The vision of the future of these giants who guide the world agenda, and who are often also the biggest funders of pharmaceutical companies, is that of a genetically modified man completely disconnected from nature and its rhythms and perpetually connected to a virtual reality. This new lifestyle should, according to those who conceived it, finance it and build it, allow us to make rational choices, make us live longer, increase our memorisation capacity, reduce the risks of today’s life.
The rebirth of free men
Masanobu Fukuoka said: “Illness comes when people move away from nature. The severity of the illness is directly proportional to the degree of separation. If a sick person returns to a healthy environment the illness often disappears”.
In a historical moment in which we have been deprived of the most elementary freedoms, in which we are increasingly moving towards the medicalisation of every phase of life, the digitalisation and robotisation of every process to the point of thinking of artificial wombs, my son Arios was born at home in the middle of the mountains, in a magical landscape covered in snow, which, in Celtic language, means “free man”.
Giulia experienced pregnancy and childbirth as a sacred moment of her life, without entrusting herself to doctors or the classic protocols that consider pregnancy as an illness. Labour occurred instinctively, without anyone pushing Giulia to do anything different from what her body was communicating to her. No tearing, no blood loss, but above all no stress, ensured that Giulia was immediately in shape and with good energy. Arios, separated from his placenta only after two days, is spending his first weeks suckling and sleeping blissfully. The house is warm thanks to the boiler where wood from our woods burns. Still in the vegetable garden the last vegetables are being harvested under the ice and the chickens have resumed egg production, after the usual break in November and December. Soon the work of the seedbed will begin, the pruning of the small vineyard and some fruit plants, then it will be time for the seedbed and with the explosion of spring the great work in the vegetable garden, in the orchards and in the fields will resume. Without algorithms, platforms, chemical products, but mainly with manual work and with age-old gestures, we will continue to take care of our self-sufficiency and our land. Today, if we truly want to, we can still choose whether to entrust our family, health, food, energy, sociality, entertainment to the world technocracy that has been taking shape, or whether to write a completely different story.
Written by Francesco Rosso. This article was featured in the magazine Vivi Consapevole 64, March/May 2021.
