Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Federico MINELLE
Good evening, everybody!
Economy of justice: it's a choice, actually.
Today we are talking about the most suitable way
to manage the exit from the crisis,
assuming we have already entered it, we suffered through it,
and now we have to come out of this crisis.
And you need to know how.
I wonder how we relate to this crisis,
and I have a feeling
that we relate to the crisis in a very religious way,
as a sort of Apocalypse, a cyclical Apocalypse,
the world needs to enter and recover from.
It was all okay,
then there was the Apocalypse and then we recover.
And that seems really weird to me.
Also because I delved
at the origin of this word "Apocalypse"
and I found in that word no dramatic nuances at all,
in the Greekness of that word.
Yes, the Apocalypse is the end of a cycle.
But no one says that it must end badly,
with lots of injured and dead people, as we see.
And hence I wondered where this sense of fatality comes from,
that makese us to assume that when a cycle ends,
it necessarily ends badly.
And we also accept it,
as if there was an ethical point in accepting it.
I’d like to tell a story, an Hassidic story.
He is a 19th century Hassidic master, who is among his disciples,
and then, at a certain point,
stops before the shyest of these disciples
and asks him: "What do you live on?"
And he replies:
"I am just a humble baker, sir.
I basically buy flour
and a little yeast
and then make bread, using water as well.
I live on this bread, as I sell it,
take a part of the proceeds to feed my large family,
and I reinvest the rest in flour and yeast".
And the master says to him,
"I didn't ask you how you spend your time! I asked you what you're living on!"
And the poor guy gets sweaty.
He is not used to have the master talking directly to him,
the shyest of his disciples.
And he repeats his story again, swearing, saying to the master:
"But I am a baker, really!"
The master keeps getting angry, saying:
"I didn't ask you how your spend your time!
I asked you what you live on!"
And finally, after a few minutes,
the master embraces the disciple
and, since the master is politically correct,
does not tell him "You did not understand me!",
but rather: "I didn't express myself well!".
And then:
"I asked you to share the dreams you live on.
I want to know your dreams".
And I wondered
whether the crisis hasn't come about for a lack of dreams -
lack of premises, actually.
So I went back in time, in memory, in history,
and said to myself:
"Perhaps, when we create,
we need to have premises,
when we work."
And they tell me,
there is a concept of "Imitatio Dei", playing God,
i.e. try to do the job well.
So I went to peek into the premise of creation.
The premises of creation are extraordinary:
there is nothing, and suddenly there is everything,
obviously in potential -
but ex nihilo, from nothing.
And I thought, it's very difficult for a human being
to conceive this ex nihilo.
Basically impossible.
In fact, even when the baby is born, which seems to be born ex nihilo,
we are so blinded by the joy of seeing the baby,
we do not pose ourselves the problem.
Then how to conceive this creation?
Well, maybe it's better to conceive it from the end.
And the end is death,
and death is something we are all much more accustomed to.
More than presence, we are used to absence.
We have been living absence since we were children.
All traumas are deficiency or absence traumas.
We, therefore, conceive more easily
the emptiness in being, the nothingness.
And what does emptiness entail?
In other words, this void is necessary so that we can create,
so that we can imagine a new society,
so that we can live.
This void is the result of a retreat.
We must - imitatio dei -
learn to retire in order to create.
“Retire” means to welcome the other, those who are different from you.
And so the assumption of any creation, I came naively to think,
was an ethical, moral premise.
You can only create on an ethical basis.
This void corresponds to your retirement,
and it is fundamental.
Think of an entrepreneur
who creates by retiring initially.
It is quite extraordinary, in the sense of uncommon -
but we have never tried, in fact.
So, perhaps
this is a possible way out from the crisis:
we should, for example,
someone told me,
think about a company's ethical features.
I say, ethical issues?
Ethical issues
are a relativization of ethics with respect to enterprise.
When ethics, in fact,
is the assumption of every imaginable enterprise.
I insist, we cannot imagine an enterprise, creation,
without initially imagining a retirement,
a deeply, purely, exquisitely moral act.
Therefore, this ethical aspect
is no longer an aspect, it is a fundamental premises.
After that, I can going on.
If we manage this crisis,
the exit from the crisis,
thinking back to the premises,
how is it that you can verify,
as you go ahead in the enterprise,
respect for the premises?
That is, respect for ethics,
which is the foundation of every human enterprise -
and probably not only human ones.
So perhaps these are the dreams that our teacher talks about:
what are the dreams that allow you to live,
these dreams very, very concrete?
And there I look a little in depth into the Jewish tradition,
into the so-called Jewish identity.
Jewish identity is strongly associated
to a land, a place,
and to the attachment to this land.
For 20 centuries of exile,
three times a day,
a people kept mentioning a land in the Middle East,
no matter they were thousands of miles far from this land,
and often they could not indicate this land on a map.
But they mentioned it three times a day and said:
"My eyes look to this land”.
And we know that 20 centuries ago there was an attempt,
by this same identity, with a desire for universalism,
to break away from this land.
And this universalism marked the advent of Christianity.
But we also know the hardships
this universalistic advent underwent,
and the trail of blood it left behind.
And so at this point I wondered if the check,
that famous check
of the ethical premise of every human enterprise,
was not really dependent
on the concrete location of a company.
A company takes place on the land we live on.
But I do not mean a geopolitical entity:
rather, the actual land,
our situation, our civilization.
And it is there that we must verify
whether this company
is really about the acceptance of the other,
of the act of creation, precisely,
as this company grows.
Perhaps we haven’t checked it
during the expansion that we have experienced for,
by now, more than twenty years.
Perhaps we will have to ask ourselves again
what the dreams are that allow us to live.
It is not about managing the crisis, and our way out of it:
it is about managing a human life in society, I think.
That’s the real deal, in my opinion.
Thank you.
(Applause)