(Marco Emanuele)
We have gone too far beyond the limits of systemic sustainability. It is not just an ecological issue, a matter of caring for the natural environment, but concerns everything, from the quality of our social relationships to international relations. Systemic sustainability goes hand in hand with peace.
We have often written that we have reached a turning point: well, the time has come for our complex research to begin developing new cultural and operational paradigms. If we are living in difficult times, partly due to our shared responsibility, it is up to us to understand the value of limits in historical mediations and visions. Women and men of peace are those who, thinking critically, work for a culture of limits, embodying the principle of systemic sustainability.
Many of us, in our daily lives, realise that the overall system we knew has been overtaken by events: history is moving faster than our ability to govern it. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the consolidation of an unstoppable technological revolution, both the ruling classes and each of us have been unable to grasp the signs of the transformation taking place. We thought that everything could continue as before, in a substantially linear and causal manner: instead, we had entered the age of complexity, which is now overwhelmingly before us.
Complexity is a fact; it is constitutive of us and of reality. But it is also a fundamental paradigm when associated with our ability to think about our shared history and each personal history within it. Complex thinking is what we need to frame the beyond in what is happening: reality tells us that we are at the peak of the degenerative crisis of linear thinking in every field. While degenerative linear thinking is the thinking of war, complex thinking is the thinking of peace in systemic sustainability.
From these initial considerations, it is clear that peace requires a medium- to long-term commitment and, above all, that it must permeate every aspect of our coexistence. This confirms the grave mistake, perpetrated in the name of a misguided realism, that peace is merely the absence of war: nothing could be more superficial.
Peace encompasses all the complexity of us humans: our potential, our contradictions, our mistakes. Nothing is as much a part of us and belongs to us as peace: peace is a moral appeal and a historical condition for effective systemic sustainability, too often neglected and violated.
