In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, John Middleton Murry, inspired by the writings of Leon Shestov, wrote in his introduction to Anton Chekhov and other essays that the modern man needs to «learn honesty again: (…) the honesty that cries aloud in instant and passionate anger against the lie and the half truth, and by an instinct knows the authentic thrill of contact with the living human soul». This also means that even the opposite is valid: in the society of power and greed there are "others," that do not feel they need to learn honesty, those who believe that to be in power automatically means to be right, those who can consider true only what is believed by the many. In the blink of an eye "those people" immediately recognize the person that lives in the honesty that Middleton Murry invokes and by instinct they are immediately prone to reject and exclude who is different from them. If there is a major fault in the society of power and greed is that it tends to push forward the individuals with less values. The more selfish and humanly poor you are, the bigger are your opportunities to climb on the social ladder. Well, the result of this setting-out was well described in a few lines by the Roman historian Tacitus when he wrote: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
(© Sergio Caldarella)

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