At the Rise of a New Humanism

I come from a long pause, a deep breath. In the automaton-like life each of us must pass through before realizing we’re dissatisfied with ourselves, I got lost. I began to believe I was no longer my ideas or my thoughts, but a set of practical, repetitive gestures—something very close to vomit. The obsessive cyclicality of small daily actions is the first death of a human being: not in matter, but in concept. In that instant, nothing retains value. There is no other purpose—only mechanical doing. And if someone had told me that a lunchbox would become my way of throwing punches at life, I probably would have opted for hardship and drug addiction. We are flesh, bone, and hypocrisy: our golden chains bruise our wrists, yet they shine brightly, and that’s apparently enough.

There’s a monologue that echoes in my head every day. Lulù (Gian Maria Volonté) in The Working Class Goes to Heaven speaks to his fellow piece-rate workers: “I worked for production, I increased, I increased. And now what have I become? A beast. The student says we’re like machines, that I am a machine, I’m a pulley, I’m a bolt, I’m a screw, I’m a transmission belt, I’m a pump. But now the pump doesn’t work anymore, the pump is broken.”

I understand Lulù, who immersed himself in the factory so deeply that he became one of its gears. Piecework was the great scourge: the more you work, the more you earn. Then at some point, the logic shifted: the better you work, the more you earn.

And what about us? Lost children of the twenty-first century, self-styled enfant prodige of progress and innovation—what are we if not piece-rate workers who’ve been sold shit as if it were chocolate?

Let’s step into the thicket. There was a time when politics determined the fate of humankind. Politics as a philosophical and social discipline, to be clear, not the remnant we have today. The system governing life was that of welfare: the State acting as mediator and guardian of its citizens’ well-being, even if that meant intervening in the economic system. Then an entity with shifting forms and a pronounced voracity appeared and began to swallow the Eden we had imagined. The logic that took shape was this: a State worthy of the name must preserve the personal freedoms of individuals, politically and economically. The ingredients: free enterprise, free competition, supply and demand, and self-regulation. The name of the beast in its embryonic state: liberalism. And up to this point, one might even agree.

If not for the drift that even the purest concepts manage to take. Who would have thought (some did) that from these very ideas would sprout the pressure sore of our society?

Those less blinded by the sparks of progress had already foreseen it: the great entrepreneurial bodies—first born, then elevated to pillars of those much-celebrated ideals of freedom—ended up replacing the State. What once was the leading actor in the citizen’s life became a traffic officer, with all due respect, directing the market’s flow with symbolic decision-making power.

The logic of competition replaced the logic of solidarity. It has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. It has instituted an eternal race and pinned numbers to our chests as in the finest marathons. We became gears without even realizing it, just like Lulù. Humans are no longer at the center of their existence; what they produce is. And so we began consuming exquisitely refined chocolate flavored with meritocracy and personal freedom, without noticing the stench of shit.

If we continue down this path, the only thing awaiting us is a rather violent post-apocalyptic scenario many already anticipate. We have lived up to this moment within a perpetual promise. We have all tried to win the race, to annihilate the competition, to obsessively follow with our noses that treat held tight in the fist of capitalist logic. We have let ourselves be intoxicated by the smell of that antidote that, when misused, becomes dangerous: freedom. In return, we received nothing but gasoline to pour on the fire of our modern class struggle. There is no petite or haute bourgeoisie, no proletariat or sub-proletariat, no industrialists or great landowners. There is us, and there is them. There are the ordinary, and then all the others. The most powerful 1% in history. And if someone’s golden chains seem to shine more than others’, good for them, because it’s all they have left. What was the point of plunging into the muck that looked like crystal-clear water? What was the point of letting our lives be dragged by free competition and the market taken as father, son, and holy spirit? Nothing. We are not privileged—get that into your heads.

The system allowed itself to be chewed up by its own creatures—the best engineered ones, the ones everyone admired with glistening eyes.

We are left with the crumbs reserved for fools. But there is one thing we still haven’t considered, which history must remind us of. In moments of disappointment, collapse, and emergency, humankind always restarts from humankind. Not from what it has, but from what it is since the dawn of time.

It’s not about survival instinct or a great reset—we wouldn’t even be capable of following either anymore, even if we wanted to. It’s about a change of course, not even an innovative one, truth be told—just enough to uphold the frugal logic of “minimum effort, maximum yield” so dear to us lethargic evolved chimpanzees. Humans need to return to the center of their own existence, entirely. In the age of technology, we must return to conceiving the human being as a fulcrum, not a mere executor. The State must reclaim the fate of its citizens, make use of the market rather than be used by it. The economy must shed its unnecessary scaffolding and return to its primary objective: the well-being of human beings as such, not as enterprises. Art and culture must once again celebrate the human in their wholeness, in complexities and contradictions. They must not be merely alternative ways of making a living; they must rediscover their purest essence. Protest and dissent must spread, so that the sleepers may awaken. We can no longer allow ourselves to be domesticated by those who promised us everything and delivered nothing. We cannot allow a machine that has proven far from perfect to continue deciding for us. We can be happy, and we have forgotten this. We can pursue that happiness by restoring the value we deserve—not just the value the system assigned us based on what we produced. Humanity must become human again and forget it was once a gear. Thought, word, idea—these must become the tools that place humans back at the center of their own cosmos. Let’s make sure everyone realizes they have been deceived, and let’s do it quickly. Only then will we finally be able to breathe and let ourselves be caressed by a faint but powerful light. The light of the dawn of a new humanism.

At the Rise of a New Humanism