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The Invisible Side of Organisations

ESE — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

There is nothing you have to ‘become’…no career to chase no desires to follow…But only to enter into the depths of your being and realize you already possess and are Everything.

Elio D’Anna, President and Founder of the European School of Economics speaks on the Structure of Man and Organizations, an excerpt from the New Book due for publishing in December, 2011.

The Invisible Side of Organisations

Q: Starting with the idea we see in your last book, ‘The School for Gods,’ that the Economy of a nation is the Projection of its ideas and values, and that the wealth of a society depends on the depth of its moral and ethical system, to what extent does the value system of a man or organization influence his ability to perform and succeed in business….in life?

Elio: It’s difficult for us to realize that we live in a world made of ‘invisibility’, and that we, ourselves, are part of that invisible world. All of our thoughts, emotions, fantasies, memories and imaginings and above all our dreams, are part of a world that is intangible and parallel to what we have learned to interpret as existence. An organization is a living being – so for an organization, the most subtle of its components – its ideas, values and fundamental beliefs all come from its invisibility….

Q: So we can say that the value system of a man influences his ability to perform….?

Elio: No . A man attracts his life according to what he IS – to his being. If you accept that his value system ‘influences’ his reality, you are affirming that there is a time delay between what that man is, and the reality surrounding him – that he depends on something ‘outside’ of himself.

Q: Then, in fact, even the value system of a man or organization is a consequence of what he is, and not vice versa.

Elio: Exactly. One day it will be common practice that businesses, as all religions, philosophies, disciplines and therapies, aim towards the stimulation of this invisibility. A businessman, behind the apparent search for profit is at the service of a project – he cares for every member of his organization and knows that their improvement and longevity is his success.

Q: What will be the strength of the Organizations of the future?

Elio: Their very ability to generate and transmit a sense of purpose – this aim towards ‘immortality’, though hidden, will not only attract new members, but keep the group united.

Q: How will they be prepared?

Elio: The cost of an ordinary, mediocre education is unemployment and failure. The price for success and victory is paid through the application of a special teaching based mainly on self-observation, self-knowledge and fearlessness. This will be the preparation.

In time, any achievements or understanding a man believes to have realized will cease to have meaning, and whatsoever he has held as vital, sacred or important in his life no longer will have significance. Here is the crucial point where something higher has to take place - something totally unknown to man that only a School of Being can reveal.

The interviewer asks the explanation for a ‘School of Being’. Elio responds then goes on to elaborate on the application in Family business. The interviewer seems to have a question roster to respect.

Q: Usually when there is the passage from one generation to another a business suffers. What can be done to prevent this?

Elio: The only real reason for the premature disappearance of an enterprise is the absence of men of integrity. ‘Creating' men of integrity like enterprises is always a revolution.

Q: So it will take a long time to realise this dream…

Elio: No. This revolution cannot happen in time, but in the complete absence of time, in a vertical time. There is no evolution in time. In linear time humanity can only repeat itself and its history of conflicts and crime. Between a man from the stone age and a modern man there is no difference. Millions of years have passed if we want to believe in time, without anything happening. Only in the absence of time can the Antagonist disappear and with him every conflict.

Q: When you say that the world outside is only 'apparent,' do you mean that there is nothing like pain, suffering and war - that this is a lovely world? When they take away your job or you are full of misery and have no food for your family or when your son dies in an absurd war, you say that this is not real?

Elio: Yes, this is only an imaginative ideological concept that you believe to be true — just a world of theories, a mere description of reality and not reality itself. Violence, fear, loneliness, pain, war, birth and death are just concepts generated by your memory and imagination, which are in their turn mere shadows and not facts.

Q: What do you mean by ‘facts’?

Elio: What you yourself are in this precise instant is a fact. You yourself free of all fears is a fact. You yourself free of that bundle of lies which constitutes history, tradition, knowledge, religion, culture, and experience, is a fact.
The timeless 'you' is a fact. All that which apparently exists in time and which you believe to be external, instead will reduce you to dullness and impotence. Remember! Only what has been 'done' inside is real and can be permanent, the rest is just a short film disintegrating as it is made.
In the economics to come - industries and corporate enterprises should teach the ‘Art of Dreaming’ - the principles of self-improvement and inner integrity to enable their people, managers and employees, to ‘do’ inside’, and to become advanced beings. The world of business has to realize that real, financial expansion comes out of quality, and declines rapidly when quality is missing.
What is your deep, major interest in Life? Is it acquiring money, prestige, security? Then you must see that the consequences of such interests are instead worry, fear, uncertainty and misery. A man who takes responsibility for his men, his enterprise has a greater project in mind and will have a much greater reward….
The European School of Economics has the ‘dream’ of a happy and free humanity, of a truly rich economy. It is not the resources of the planet that are limited, but humanity itself - its limited vision and incomplete psychology keep it from extending well-being to every individual, organization, culture and civilization.
Outside of you there is no antagonist, enemy or demon, and neither is there inside…

Q: So why is the world so full of injustice and violence?

Elio: This is pure imagination.
Outside there is no injustice or violence, no limits, nor obstacles or enemies. They are all illusions - mere shadows. They exist because you indulge in forgetfulness and ignorance in a self-sabotage produced by destructive thoughts, negative emotions and attitudes....
There is nothing and no time 'out there' - a ‘time’ that gives cadence to your life, a time that makes you get old, sick and die...... Victory is not an outer achievement, victory is a state of being ....it is the victory over the illusionary - over that which does not exist....You keep looking for solutions and 'faults' outside, but the outside world only reminds you : ‘you’re too distracted.’
There are not thousands of problems to solve, but just one - yourself. You can’t allow yourself to lose even an atom of your integrity. The world is a blessing. It warns you and gives you signals when a fracture is coming : ‘Come home – to the totality of being—and everything will be perfect!’ You can’t indulge even for a second, because the entire world depends on you. The world reflects perfectly all that you are and is perfect because it is created in your image. The real insanity is this fragmentation you carry inside. Remember! Like attracts like, solution attracts solution, life attracts life.
Stay in contact with the deepest part of yourself. Don't stray from the center! Observe yourself and study the prison that you unconsciously have built within yourself. Look at the contradictions and weaknesses you carry inside and remove them by simply being aware, the observation of the unconscious makes it disappear and releases energy.

Q: What path, if any, should a man follow to prepare himself to be successful in Business?

Elio: You are the main Cause of all and everything!' Remember this, and there will be no other discipline to follow. Remember! Any knowledge coming from the outside is false. And only self-knowledge is real knowledge.

Q: What does business have to do with self-knowledge?

Elio: At the time of a great financial crisis many bankers, businessmen and stockbrokers ‘crash’ also because they totally identify with the failing economy.
In what should be a marvelous game of creativity and intuition, they instead are hypnotized to the point that they no longer realize to be the players and not the pawns, the observers and not the observed, the dreamers and not the dreamed. They depend upon external conditions to plan their strategies, and rely upon budgets, reports and financial forecasts to unconsciously build nothing more than a house of cards.
But what happens then, when the slightest tremor comes unexpectedly razing it all to the ground? Self-knowledge means freedom from any conditioning or identification with the world around. Self-knowledge puts harmony, order and justice in every atom of your inner world. Its power spreads out in all directions creating a new history and a new destiny, a new past and a new future, a new life and a new man. Self-knowledge is the very basis for success in any field of life.
A man who really knows himself, free from any external conditioning reveals his inner integrity and projects the unfailing world of his Dream…….
If you believe in an external world, then make use of it. Let all the experiences, events and circumstances fall in a place within yourself where you can filter the most useful and eliminate what is useless. This is the place where all your ballast can be transformed in energy and brand new life. Remember! The outer world is only a faded shadow of your inner space, a pale manifestation of your inner responsibility….
Elio pauses, listening carefully as if to an unspoken question….

Elio: The solution to any problem is not in casting blame or finding fault on others, but rather in redeeming and rebuilding your own compromised integrity. Integrity is a state of being and as such you only have the capacity to know how it has been compromised or lost or forgotten. Fear, for example, disconnects you from the source of your own vitality.
Integrity means a sense of certainty, coherence, wholeness, fearlessness and aliveness. Integrity is a physical experience - you can feel it in your flesh, in your joints, in your breath and in your heart. Integrity has powerful applications in the realm of action. Companies and enterprises guided by integrity are those that are successful, well-run, profitable, everlasting and happy. A man of integrity is a force of nature - in the physical realm, he has always another ocean to cross or some other mountain to climb, and is never out of the game.
Give all the attention and the whole of your spare time to your inner being, and nothing will be impossible to you. Don’t forget! You are the one who is projecting and perceiving beyond the conceivable – creator of this wonderful universe.
Don' t stop dreaming! Reality is made of your dream. It's your dreaming substance that gives Life to the world. If you stop dreaming the world dies. It is as simple as that….Poverty, crime and war come from a society that has stopped dreaming. Entire civilizations, races, empires, countries and peoples have disappeared from the face of the Earth for having forgotten the real reason of their existence. Dream! Apply the principles of the School and remember that Life like Business is a School of Being.
The Dreamer brought you a very powerful technology to use: the Art of Dreaming, which is the only way to stop all misery and sufferings. In a world where all kinds of revolution have failed, all attempts to change the violent nature of man revealed futile, the Art of Dreaming reveals as the only practical way to transform events and circumstances, history and destiny, past and future at will. Remember! When you will get rid of every violence, conflict and misery inside yourself, crimes, revolutions and wars will miraculously disappear from this planet – the way out is the way in.

: all passages in cursive are quotes from the Dreamer.

Business and Self-Knowledge

ESE — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Q. I want to see my company grow and make profits but find it hard to reconcile my ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ lives. What does business have to do with self-knowledge?

A. At the time of a great financial crisis many bankers, businessmen, and stockbrokers ‘crash’ also because they totally identify with the failing economy. In what should be a marvelous game of creativity and intuition, they are hypnotized to the point that they no longer realize to be the players and not the pawns, the observers and not the observed, the dreamers and not the dreamed. They depend upon external conditions to plan their strategies, and rely upon budgets, reports and financial forecasts to unconsciously build nothing more than a house of cards. But what happens then, when the slightest tremor comes unexpectedly razing it all to the ground? Self-knowledge means freedom from any conditioning or identification with the world around. Self-knowledge puts harmony, order and justice in every atom of your inner world. Its power spreads out in all directions creating a new history and a new destiny, a new past and a new future, a new life and a new man. Self-knowledge is the very basis for success in any field of life.

A man who really knows himself, free from any external conditioning, reveals his inner freedom, and projects the unfailing world of his Dream.

Elio D'Anna
European School of Economics Foundation

Qualitative Economy

ESE — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0000

A mere act of attention due to self-observation, may change your inner state, your position in yourself, and get you into a better position in life.

You know a lot about being in the wrong or right place in life, but very little about being in the wrong or right place inside yourself.

But remember! The internal is the very cause and so much more important than the external.
You cannot expect to make the right decisions when you are in the wrong place internally, when your level of attention is zero.

When you are in a bad, narrow, evil place internally, the world that you yourself project becomes colder, denser, thicker, heavier.

A quantitative economy is based on calculation, programs, plans and mathematics; and mathematics cannot deal with qualities, but only with quantities. If you live in a merely quantitative universe, nothing is possible for you - neither change, nor transformation, because transformation is a question of quality.

Life can be transformed only by changing your dream - that is, by turning something lower into something higher.

An ordinary man, a machine-man is a function of the nature-machine, guided by nature and obedient to nature.

A man of School starts to work in a different direction, turning upside down his own vision.
A man of integrity, a fully understanding being, contains life, and through his revealed Will can move mountains in the world of events.

An ordinary man sees everything as opposites - a higher level of integrity sees all sides of a question simultaneously.

In a qualitative economy, the amount of efforts is useless in comparison with the quality of efforts.
Your position and role in life is determined by the quality of your own being.

(from The School for Gods)

Love yourself inside

ESE — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:00:00 +0000

An ordinary man only apparently loves himself and wishes himself good health, prosperity and well-being. If he could observe and know his inner self, he would hear within, a constant chant of negative thoughts and worries, the recital of a prayer of misfortune in the expectation of terrible events, however probable or improbable.

Self-sabotage
Among the things I have learned from the Dreamer, which I have narrated in my Book “The School for Gods”, one of the most amazing is the unveiling of the existence in the ordinary man of a shadowy second nature which manifests itself as a self-destructive attitude, and an irresistible urge to damage and finally eliminate oneself. He called it self-sabotage. It can be considered the dominant psychological feature of the old humanity, though the official science has not yet understood the planetary extention of this phenomenon.
Self-sabotage is the effect of a fragmented psychology that in most people manifests in a sense of guilt and a constant feeling of uncertainty and failure; man becomes victim of the song of sorrow he sings inside, and of the flow of negative imagination and destructive thoughts ceaselessly echoing inside him.
People live too often and for too long outside of themselves, lost in identification with the world, and thereby enlarging the distance from the real part of themselves. The anguish you feel is the most reliable signal that you have forgotten - hypnotized by the imagination of the world as a separate reality external to yourself.
As a consequence, an ordinary man secretely thinks of his death as the solution to all his troubles, and unconsciously tries to accelerate his physical departure. Homo sapiens has reduced itself to a suicidal species finding in drugs, smoking, alcohol, unhealthy diet, and above all, negative emotions, its terrifying menu or list of options for perpetrating one’s elimination. If we would try to stop them, and oppose their project of death, they would not see us as rescuers or benefactors. On the contrary, such an attempt would turn them into mortal enemies, and in the end would only postpone their self-sabotage.» The School for Gods. Sinedie. 2010.

Love Yourself
The remedy is: love yourself inside; love yourself unceasingly. It means to be in contact with the most real part of yourself. It means achieving and living a state of victory, of grace, and of understanding - a state of innocence. This word comes from the Latin root innocent which means not-nocere ‘not + to hurt’. Innocent in its true meaning is then the quality of a man who is not harming himself, who is not devoted to the favourite planetary occupation of self-sabotage.
For unprepared people, loving oneself inside looks like quite a boring condition, in which it seems that nothing happens and excitement is missing, compared to the state of apprehension and constant turmoil in which ordinary men live. For a man, however, who remains lucid and firm in loving himself inside, everything is punctual, and even the confusion of the world – that anarchy where everything is apparently rebelling and trying to escape from composing itself into a unity - appears to be a movement of fusion, towards a higher level of integrity.

Stop damaging yourself
Most people believe that the world as it is does not work and cannot go ahead without their intervention, and so try to bring solutions to the others, thinking to resolve their problems, and to heal their illnesses. Their vanity makes them believe that they, themselves are healed and ready to help others. In reality, he who has not defeated the lie within himself, he who is unaware of the self-sabotage that continually goes on within him, cannot do anything for anyone. The only thing you can really do to help the world is to wake up from your nightmare and stop damaging yourself. We meet a beggar and we feel compelled to help him, or anyone in need, for the sake of our unconscious fear that we could find ourselves in that condition and the hope that we could find help. Our fear, however, is creating the object of our fear. While you think of this eventuality you are already laying the grounds for this very thing to happen. Your mere thought has already put you there. In the moment in which you are giving aid, you find yourself covered in his rags, and begging in his place. You tell yourself, “I’ll never be in that state of need!”.

Behind the smokescreen of philanthropy
Let’s open our eyes to the falseness hiding behind altruism and most forms of charity fostered by institutions that live off people’s sense of guilt. Most humanitarian organizations only exist to perpetuate themselves. They specialise in obtaining funds and gathering resources which they then misspend and squander, barely managing to even support themselves. If you lift the smokescreen surrounding philanthropy in its every form, you might discover that behind the suffragists and the Salvation Armies, behind medical and pharmaceutical aid and the distribution of food, hides the most atrocious organized crime and the worst acts against man. In reality, help creates the need for help, in an endless vicious circle. Every day the army of humanitarians, altruists and philantropists grows, and all the evils that they pretend to fight extend and become more acute. Poverty and famine have never been so widespread. Working on the effects and never tackling the cause, they only feed themselves, their pockets, and their vanity. Poverty is a mental illness. Death is only in our heart. If we could recognize this, we would revolutionize the very concept of charity. Only the ‘dream’ can change poverty into prosperity, and difficulties into understanding. A man, a corporation, a nation who dreams is never poor - can never be poor. He who has defeated the lie and self-sabotage in himself, who loves himself inside, has not to look for any external help. He is the solution and has the power of doing for himself, and because of it, for the world and for others.

The world needs your change
Think how much vulgarity and emotional debris is eliminated through this realization. Guilt, victim consciousness, and false love for others are all swept away at once, together with all the philanthropic organizations and humanitarian organizations founded on false altruism.

The world doesn't need your help, but desperately, your change.

Do you think this can make us cynical and mean? A person who loves himself inside cannot be cynical or mean towards others. When you have won inside, you are the healing of all and everything. Doing for yourself, through your innocence, you are bringing the greatest possible help for the world.
Loving yourself is the only thing to do, and the only activity to overcome inner fragmentation; it is the only way to regain our oneness. Loving ourselves inside is the fusion of all the scattered particles of our Being into one single entity. We call this achievement Integrity.

The tingling, vibrating sensation
In order to give to others we have first to know how to give to ourselves.

To give I have to have; to have I have to be.

He who has not achieved a state of wholeness is a man in need, is truly poor, and cannot give anything to anybody.
When we were little children we used to wake up with a sensation of joy - the feeling of our integrity and the feeling of being complete. Nothing was missing. Adults have long forgotten that ecstasy in their body, but when you start to love yourself you can feel it again as a tingling, vibrating sensation under your skin. A leader knows that he has to wait for this physical signal before any decision is made, and before any action is taken. A leader knows the golden law of economy: I have because I give; I give because I am. Giving is above all self-giving - the donation of one’s being. I give what I am. Through loving himself, he gains the power to give to others what really matters and what they really need: his fearlessness, courage, commitment, and his sense of safety.

The Economics of Immortality

ESE — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Conference hosted by the European Commission, Bruxelles, 8 October 2009

Thanks to the President of EuReform, Steven Colin for inviting me, to EC for hosting this conference and to Daniela Terrile for organizing it. The idea to schedule it at lunch time is congruent with my purpose to give you food for thought. Before starting, let me state in advance that I am not here as the Rector of the European School of Economics or as the writer of “The School for Gods.” I came to join you - your association - for the common purpose of raising the effectiveness of the European Commission - a body so important and vital for Europe - and for bringing to you the results of our research.
I know beforehand that after expounding them, you will find it hard to accept most of the crucial findings of my studies and of the fundamental ideas and principles that they are based on. But let me pose to you a question: who among you can state that he has discovered an amazing idea throughout the entire course of his life? Who has ever come across something so outstanding that you could cry out “I have never heard such a thing before”?

Thinking is Destiny
Interesting is not enough... What I am asking is if you have ever met an amazing, baffling, disconcerting, shocking idea… something so powerful that it turns your mind upside down, something contrary to common sense, adverse to reason, opposite to anything you had believed so far. To give you an idea: “Love your enemy”, just the prospect that we could love enemies, is what we can call an amazing, subversive idea. And 2.000 years later this lofty paradox continues to keep all its disruptive potential. The belief encapsulated in the motto: Homo faber est suae quisque fortunae (every man is the artisan of his own fortune) is another majestic idea, one of the main psychological pillars on which the Roman empire was built. The philosophy of a man, of a corporation, or of an entire nation, their ideas and values, determine their success and account for their longevity.
Before we reach the age of 20 we have already built a complete system of deep convictions and beliefs. Hence, we can spend our entire life never meeting one idea which clashes with our mental schemes, or one of those ideas that can move mountains. Quite soon in our life we become impenetrable to any evidence or even to minor affirmations that could vaguely contrast with our old set of beliefs and consolidated ideas. Ordinary humanity seems to be condemned to think alike and to use the same set of thoughts forever - from cradle to grave. Thinking is destiny means that we will never be able to change our destiny, neither as society nor as individuals, without changing our thinking. Hence, we find the need for revolutionary ideas. Original, innovative, unconventional ideas are the most strategic resource for the future of the species. They are the engine of our evolution and of our economy.
Mankind can change its destiny. In order to do that we have to change our psychology, the hypnotic world-story rooted in our system of convictions and beliefs. Do not get worried! I haven’t the slightest concern with needing to convince you, neither any hope to change even the least of your thoughts. But an individual can make these changes for himself. One among you may be ready to change his vision, and therefore his life and the reality for thousands of people. Just one of you, if I am lucky, will make it worth my journey to have come here.

Japan: A Textbook case
I could say that I am a repentant, reformed economist. I stopped believing in economics long ago, since the time I found out that so many important phenomena cannot be explained by it.
Let’s look at the case of the global crisis that the world is facing.
Economists do not know how to face the global crisis, and economics has shown itself to be far from a science. The reason is that this crisis is not financial or economic. It is a crisis of values and has its source in the scarcity of real leaders, a shortage of committed, visionary men and women. A textbook case is that of modern Japan, and the difficulty of economics to find a convincing explanation for its prodigious economic growth. Japan lost two wars. The Second World War culminated with its defeat and the destruction of two main towns by atomic bombs. Japan is extremely overpopulated, speaks an impossible language, and is in the middle of nowhere. They were just emerging from a medieval culture. To top it all, Japan does not have any natural resources whatsoever. How could it become the second most powerful economy in the world? We might be very interested in understanding how it was possible. Is there any economist who can give us such an explanation? If we could discover the secret of Japan’s development we could solve the problem of any developing country. Ironically, we could ask them: are you in need of everything? Have you any resources at all? Have you just come out of the destruction caused by conflicts or are you half shattered by a civil war? If your answer is yes, then you are in the best condition to become an affluent country, a most powerful economy. It is hardly credible, is it?

Economy is a Way of Thinking
The first conclusion that we have reached is that the way we think, our psychology, is a most relevant factor of our economy... Thinking is destiny… Financial destiny as well…. But this has not always been the conviction of the economists. As matter of fact, economics has started as a pure discipline believing that the explanation of the economic facts can be found in the economy itself. This way of thinking we could call a tautology (it is a difficult word used to say - that is stupid). Let me then establish a first, general proposition of my theory.
Economy is a way of thinking, a reflection of the Being.
We cannot understand the growth of Japan if we do not know and understand its culture and traditions, from the culture of rice to the samurai tradition. We cannot understand why Japan developed so quickly, and why its social cohesion is so strong, without knowing the strength and weight of its system of values, the quality and breadth of its moral principles, and without entering into the roots of its culture and the deepness of Confucianism, which nourishes it. Confucianism is not a religion, it is a philosophy of life which works as a strong social glue.
Confucianism, which they imported from China, gave Japan its ethic DNA. Approaching the modern age, the original patrimony made up of the six main virtues recommended by K’ung Fu Tzu (Confucius) was reduced to five: Justice (i), Ceremony (li), Knowledge (chih), Faith (hsin) and Loyalty (chung). In this mutation of its ethic DNA, the sixth virtue, Compassion/Benevolence (Jen), was in time completely abandoned and Loyalty grew in importance until it assumed the position of being the central virtue in the modern Japanese system of ethics. This mutation in the invisible has moved mountains in the world of economics - demonstrating that the economy of a country is a reflection of its way of feeling and thinking, in one word, of its Being.
The system of values, the quality of thinking is the cause and the economy is the effect.

Visibilia ex Invisibilibus
This is the motto of the European School of Economics. It means that the visible is produced by the invisible.
The wealth of a nation, the economic destiny of a country, of an organization, of an individual, cannot be explained by economics. There is something in the invisibility of a country, of an organization, of a man, which explains and accounts for what we can observe in their life over time. The level of prosperity a country can achieve is equal to the quality of its system of values and above all its capacity to produce emotionally healthy individuals, visionaries, and pragmatic dreamers.

A planetary belief
If there is a unifying idea, a ritual common to the entire planet, we can find it on the first day of lessons in any school or faculty of economics. In the universities of different countries, in different cultures, at any latitude, it is possible to observe a very extraordinary thing. From the University La Sapienza in Rome, Stanford in California or the London School of Economics, even down to the smallest college on this planet, they all open the academic year in the same way. If you think about it, it sounds really incredible. It is a phenomenon which I can only call ´collective hypnotism´; in any faculty of economics you could hear the same speech made more or less with these words: “Dear students, on this planet, resources are limited, and we have to deal with this condition of scarcity. Economics is the fine art of coping with limited resources”. It is like saying: Dear students, you are here to learn how to become criminals. If resources are limited we have to find a way to grab all that we can before the others do so. And if I am stronger, smarter and greedier, I will get the resources and will leave you without.” The idea of scarcity in economics is one and the same thing with the justification of criminality and human exploitation. If resources are limited, individuals and countries must devote themselves to plunder and robbery if they want to survive.
I know just one school of economics that dares to offer to its students an opposite vision: “Resources are not limited; man is limited”. The planet is bountiful in the extreme, a cornucopia overflowing with all a man’s heart desires. In such a universe it is impossible to fear scarcity. It is not resources that are limited, but man who projects his own limitations onto the external world and causes his unconscious propensity toward scarcity to take on a concrete form.
(The School for Gods - ESE Publishing, 2009).

To Have more you have to Be more
Let me pose to you a question: if you had a company, would you give resources to irresponsible people - people without joy, without commitment, without love for their work? Would you give a powerful car to your son who just learned how to drive? This is the condition of mankind. 99.9% of humanity is made of people without the level of responsibility to deserve more resources. We already have too much for what we can handle. To have more we have to be more. For this we need schools of Being. We have to have schools of responsibility capable of increasing our capacity to be more, so that we can handle more wealth and power, or we cannot have more wealth and power. There is no animal in nature that can have the strength of a lion, if it does not have the habits and the ethics of a lion. The lion eats once a week. He never assaults or kills a pregnant prey. He is a very sober predator. That is why he can have such power.
Who decided that Iran cannot have the atomic bomb? Why are they not entitled to be a nuclear super-power? Italy has it; even North Korea has it. Why should it be denied to Iran? The reason is that we cannot trust their capacity to control such power - the power to possess weapons that could devastate the planet. We could tell them more or less what we would say to our own teenager son. “You cannot have the keys to the house yet. One day when you grow up and you show signs of maturity, we will give you the keys. We will give you the car. We will give you some money to manage”. This metaphor illustrates the condition of the planet. Whoever is the God we believe in, Jehovah, Buddha or Allah, obviously He doesn’t trust us beyond a limit. So, there are resources, innumerable and great inventions, and incredible solutions ready to defeat evils and illnesses, but we cannot have them yet, as our state of being is not at that level. We have to grow. And we do not know how to grow. To grow is like organizing an escape from Allenwood or Fort Dix penitentiaries. We cannot do it in two, in ten, or all of us together. Only the single person, only a determined individual can make it. He needs a map and an escape plan. He also needs an organization and somebody who has done it before him. He needs a School - a School of Being.

The Individual and the Mass
The leading spirits, and great individuals, have always had a recurrently fierce, violent opposition from the masses. Have you been in Piazza dei Fiori, in Rome? Have you seen the tall monument there? Yes, it is a monument to Giordano Bruno! Looking at it you could say: how nice, they have erected this imposing monument in this beautiful square to honour the memory of one of the forerunners of modern thinking, together with Galileo, Copernicus and many other free spirits of that age. You would think that it is evidence of gratitude for his intelligence and the courage of an innovator - to his pioneer spirit. But why was it erected in just that place? To no avail you would explore the base of the monument. Nowhere will you find it written: “Here is where we killed the guy; this is the exact place where we burned him.” Another scientist of that time - you know Galileo Galilei - was tortured and then put under house arrest for his theories, and he saved his life only by abjuring and denying them. Almost 500 years ago a man came up with a revolutionary idea, an idea that nobody had demonstrated scientifically before him. He decided to announce his discovery in a treatise which he entitled: De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. We are in 1543. This scientist is Niccol� Copernico. His book is now considered the birth cry of the modern age. He realized that it was impossible for his theory to be accepted. The discovery that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe, and that the Sun does not go around the Earth, but rather that the Earth goes around the Sun, was simply too much to bear. So, in expounding and demonstrating his theory he took two precautions: one, he dedicated his book to the Pope, Paolo III. The second precaution was to publish it posthumously, after his death, just to be on the safe side.
I am aware that the ideas that I am bringing here, to you, are more revolutionary and subversive than the heliocentric theory announced in the XVI century. Really, Copernico’s scientific discovery did not affect our lives that much, if 500 years later we still say: the sun rises, the sun goes down. But to discover that there is a vertical dimension to the flat world of economics, to find that the slightest elevation of our being and thinking, can move mountains in the world of events, create wealth and solve millennia old problems, can change our personal life and the future of humanity forever.

One Idea can Change the World
From the ancient economy based on slavery, and then on to the feudal economy based on serfdom, until the modern rational capitalism and the new global economy, turning points in the history of economics have always been the result of psychological revolutions and the products of immense shocks in mankind’s vision of the world. If we only knew how to trigger the next psychological revolution, what idea could blow up our mental schemes and change our way of thinking beyond a point of no return...
The economy is a reflection of the Being. Resources are not limited. To have more we have to be more. Thinking is Destiny. These ideas possess a built-in fragment of eternity. It is enough to summon such vast and courageous ideas to bring unimaginable solutions. The biggest limit that we bring hidden in our being, engraved in our psychology, in each cell of our body, is the idea that death is ineluctable - that we are prisoners sentenced to death and hopelessly waiting on death row. This idea is at the root of our every constriction - shackling our creativity. If thinking is destiny, how can we bring a radical change to our thinking? How can we instigate a revolution in our system of beliefs and elevate economics from being a pseudoscience devoted to the petty management of limited resources – hence, a predatory, criminal activity - to a planetary system of production and distribution of limitless, infinite wealth?
Now is the time to tell you something more about the title of this conversation: The Economics of Immortality. What does it mean - immortality? Why do we talk of immortality in a conference about economics?
Let me pose to you a question. When did you last pronounce the word ¨immortality¨? When did you last utter the word ¨infinity¨? Or, ¨timelessness¨? Or, ¨eternity¨? When was it? Most likely, it was in a perfume shop. “Give me a little bottle of Eternity; give me Love Forever; give me Immensity”. Then, once we have bought the perfume, we forget. We hardly utter these words more than a few times in a lifetime. Why? Because, they are extremely powerful words. They are engaging to the point that just to utter them will produce a change in our reality. What does immortality mean? It means something very simple. It means the absence of death. If there is no death, there is immortality. Why do we need to bring in this concept in economics?

Dreaming the Impossible
We had impossible dreams before. Our civilisation was built on impossible dreams... from Columbus’ idea to go west in order to find east, to the project of cutting the Suez channel. or creating from scratch a brand new capital in Brazil’s tropical rainforest, in 41 months. The myth of Icarus announced that man one day would fly! It was dreamed in Crete thousands of years ago. How many would have believed in this dream? We had to wait for the Wright Brothers for the first human flight in 1903, but we made it. What is the next impossible dream - impossible even to bear? What is the idea that is so bold and powerful as to produce the kind of shocks, the turning upside-down of our psychology, which have always preceded and created a quantum jump in the economy? The idea that death is not ineluctable, that it can be overcome! Physical immortality is the new frontier of human dreaming - the incredible thought which requires an immense strength just to be conceived. For innumerable years we have accepted death as our destiny. For millennia we have resigned ourselves to the idea that life is limited. By accepting this mental limit, everything else has consequently met a limitation in our existence. Resources, creativity, and wealth have been thought of as limited. It is like looking at the world with the eyes of a frog and complaining over the view.

A turning point in our civilization is to start to believe that death is not necessary, and not even ethical. This revolution in our thinking - removing death from our psychology, as the limit of all limits - will produce the greatest revolution in the economy - even in the planetary system of production and distribution of wealth, and in the very concept of how to build and how to measure the real affluence of a nation.

The economics of immortality
Until now, all economic systems have dealt with survival - with peoples' basic needs: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction. From this point of view, the economics of Neanderthals and the economics of a modern complex society are essentially the same.
The new economics of the coming decades deal no longer with survival or how to keep people alive for a few decades, but with immortality. New technologies and resources aim at the indefinite extension of each human life. This is the beginning of a twenty-first century economics of immortality.
All existing ideologies of left and right are outdated and obsolete. Powerful forces coming from the individual and not from the mass are steadily rescripting the fundamentals of life. You as an individual are called to create, through your dream, a new humanity and redesign within yourself a new economics and a brand new epoch.

The School for Gods
In the most crucial time of my life, I met a remarkable man who in my Book I named the Dreamer. His ideas turned my beliefs, my vision of the world, upside-down and changed my destiny. One day He told me about an ancient manuscript which centuries earlier had disappeared - apparently swallowed by the quicksand of time. He asked me to find it. Though reluctant, I put myself on the track of this legendary book of which I only knew the title and the fact that it had been written by a monk-warrior, a bizarre figure of a philosopher, called Lupelius, born in Ireland one thousand years ago. He had created a School based on the belief that death is not ineluctable, it can be overcome, as it is just the fruit of mankind’s negative imagination. According to Lupelius, death is no more than a superstition, the bad habit of a hypnotized humanity. Using original methods and his unique principles, he prepared a new race of unbeatable warriors. So, for many long months I travelled to any corner of the world looking for it, led by the crazy idea that the Book still existed and that I could find it. Finally, when I had almost lost any hope, in the ancient library of Yeveran, in Armenia, I found it. The manuscript was written in a mixture of vernacular English and Latin and was untitled. I was the only one who knew its original title: The School for Gods. I commissioned a perfect reproduction of it to take with me as a gift for the Dreamer and started studying, avidly soaking up Lupelius’ ideas.

Vision and reality are one and the same thing
Soon I realized why the Dreamer had asked me to find the manuscript of Lupelius. I was meeting with a patrimony of ideas of immense value. Here I got the powerful idea that in order to evolve, economy has to abandon obsolete beliefs, and old mental schemes. The conviction that death can be overcome meant the overthrow of all limits and the start of a psychological revolution capable of sweeping away the old, mental barriers and triggering a new world economy.
We need to draw a vertical dimension to the flat world of traditional economy, to conceive a third dimension capable of unimaginably expanding our capacity to create wealth and distribute it. The idea of immortality is an idea vertical to the plane of a bi-dimensional, ordinary thinking - a dramatic raising of our vision.
Vision and reality are one and the same thing. The larger our vision, the richer our reality.

It’s possible to change our destiny, to eliminate poverty, misery, and scarcity, but to do that we have to change man’s psychology and the hypnotic world’s story rooted in his system of convictions and beliefs. We must change the dream. Only individuals can do that. That is why a school is needed, a school of Being, potent enough to bring a planetary revolution in education, and to overturn teaching programs and methods, and exalting the vision. This is the scientific path on which we, at the European School of Economics, have set forth, and in which we believe.
Traditional education, the schools and universities we know, cannot teach the young to free themselves from conflictual thinking, prejudices and obsolete ideas, nor teach how to dare to dream the impossible, to upset any mental limit and any inner stockade, and to cultivate in themselves an indomitable passion for greatness. In order to do that, we must nourish our students with the idea of immortality, striking down the preconception that death is invincible.
The economy is a reflection of the Being. One fragment of eternity is enough to summon vast and courageous ideas, and unimaginable solutions. The conviction that death is something unavoidable is what limits us; it is at the root of our every constriction, shackling our creativity. All that we need is the idea of immortality, keeping that principle present in our own lives, and thereby freeing ourselves from the captivity of time.

Death: the world leading industry
What we call reality is only the reflection of our dreams, the mirror of our states of being. The world is such because we are such. It applies to the world economy as well. The mind of man is conflictual, his logic functions by means of contrasting concepts, and his reason is armed. This is why we know only a survival-based economy and have allowed death to become the planet’s leading industry, and the architrave that sustains the wealth of nations. From arms manufacturing to environmental pollution, from pharmaceutical production to organized crime, men and nations are serving the economy of conflict, and the economy of disaster. All of humanity is on the payroll of death.
I think that this conference should have taken place last year, in March 2008. We would celebrate forty years since Robert Kennedy delivered his speech at Kansas University. It would have been very instructive for this anniversary to read his words and to discover that forty years later we are still there, wondering about economic progress and what to do to enhance economy, to transform it from its very roots to face the planetary emergencies. Let me read the conclusive lines:

"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads.... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children. And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials... the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America -- except whether we are proud to be Americans."

So many years later, we cannot continue to measure economy the way we have done so far. Moreover we cannot continue to have a survival-based - disaster-based economy.
The same food industry which could be thought of as the furthest thing from the economy of disaster, on the other hand, is an integral part of it through food adulteration and poisoning. The business of death borders on the food industry as it is also revealed by the fact that food multinationals like Kraft Jacobs Suchard and Barilla are totally, or largely owned by corporations like Philip Morris (tobacco) and Swiss Oerlikon Buhrle (missiles and armour-plated cars). The same applies to the health industry, when we find out that within one of the largest corporations, General Electric, the products and services of the Health Division live side-by-side with the production of a wide range of systems and technologies for combat aircraft, military transport, helicopters and land vehicles for the world’s armed forces.

Beyond GDP: The A-Mors Index
Last November 2007, the conference Beyond GDP has indicated the need for better, and more complete parameters than GDP, gross domestic product, to measure the progress of societies and make comparative analysis among economies. The European Commission is studying indicators to take into account other aspects of a nation’s wealth, like education, health and social and environmental achievement. A program of the United Nations has elaborated a human development index (HDI) to integrate the GDP with the aim to tell more about the real state of wealth of an economy.
Our intent is to contribute to this international effort and to this large stream of ideas and studies, with the proposal of an index that is more than just an integration of existing or future parameters, but an enlargement of the vision. At the European School of Economics we have made intensive research to discover that which is the punctum dolens of the world economy. There, a more attentive, aware humanity will drive the needle of its will, as in acupuncture, and produce an intentional change in the pilaster that still sustains the wealth of nations and the perennial source of it: death.
Our research started from the undestanding of the true meaning of a most widely used (and abused) word: love. We could not find a satisfactory definition, until we were enlightened by the etymology of the Italian word amore and its Latin derivation: ‘a-mors’, which means absence of death.
The proposal coming from The European School of Economics, unheard of so far, is to elaborate a most important index, a parameter capable of measuring the degree of a-mors of societies and economies of the world. Or, if you like, how much advanced economies are based on the business of poverty, conflicts, criminality and all activities pretending to fight them, including medicine and fake philanthropy. And, as with General Electric, where we can know from the official balance sheet the turnover and profits coming from healthcare and lighting, and those coming from military production, we support the development of an index capable of measuring how much an economy relies on death and social disasters to produce its wealth.
This awareness will facilitate the redesign of a new economy, the epochal passage from a disaster-based capitalism and short-sighted economic system dealing with survival, to a limitless, abundant economics of immortality.

Pinocchio: the universal parable of man's destiny

ESE — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Benigni’s movie (Pinocchio) has missed an important point in Pinocchio’s fable: the dark and pitiless parable of man’s adventure. Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate. Hidden under the surface of this fable, there lies the biggest and boldest mystical text of all world literature: man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its instincts, to a real man endowed with will. As a matter of fact, Pinocchio is the most widely read book after the Bible and the Koran.

A mystical text disguised as a fable
Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists, perhaps there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi.
It is true. We are a touchy and violent species. Over the centuries, whoever had to reveal some unpleasant truths or break some deeply-rooted prejudices, had to take some timely precautions. When Copernicus, for instance, wrote the “De Revolutionibus” in which he exposed his revolutionary discovery he took two precautions: a) he dedicated his work to the Pope, b) as a security measure, he published his book after his death!
Lorenzini also had to disguise the most terrible secret as a fable and pass for an author of nursery stories rather than one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human ethnology. One day a wiser, more aware mankind will recognize him as the man who knew how to pleasantly show us the cruel and terrible truth: humanity is made up of millions of puppets; we are bio-chemical marionettes, driven by invisible threads; we are incurable liars. Above all, he will be appreciated because he told us the truth and made us laugh at the misfortunes of the poor puppet, without having his book condemned at the stake. We are incapable of seeing how Pinocchio’s toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility are the psychological stigmata of the sapiens species and the very roots of all our misfortunes.
The abandonment of his puppet dress and his transformation into a child is not a melancholic passage to normality or a cruel flight from the spell of childhood with its unbounded vitality. This is also Benigni’s interpretation. In fact, in the final scene we see Pinocchio followed by the puppet’s shadow that almost seems to be the spirit of his fantasy and original longing for life.
What a misunderstanding! In actual fact, Collodi presents us with the horror of a puppet-like sub-human moon-man who is influenced by everyone and everything. They are zombies who, through misadventure, sorrow, antagonism and disappointment, will one day enter a real humanity, sun-men who are proactive, responsible and shine in their own light.
By paraphrasing some words said by Caligula to his ministers, we could say: if Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. However if Pinocchio is a man, then we are still men with a primitive conscious, larvae still encased in their pods waiting to break out and evolve.

A riddle to solve
There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve. Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose above a Thouar or a Dazzi, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale and a world-class masterpiece that had the unfathomable depth of an evangelical parable. How is it possible that a fable hastily cobbled together, perhaps reluctantly, with no clear plan, by a man who was probably defeated by personal and political disappointments could be considered an echo of a universal message and the mirror of all mankind? It’s a worrying thought. Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like his other works, instead of choosing to use a “nom de plume”?

Wood shavings of our soul
These two questions can be made into one, in that there’s an explanation or better still an hypothesis that answers both of them. The hypothesis is that the text is both inspired and the result of a brainwave. The adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world literature.
In actual fact what we see in Pinocchio are the wood shavings of our lost soul. This explains why when we read Pinocchio the text appears to be real while the author remains an unnecessary hypothesis. His existence is superfluous like in the Old Testament and the Gospels. There’re holy books, but not holy authors. Carlo Lorenzini didn’t feel like signing a universal story, that was written in Heaven, it only had to be written down.

The awful secret
Benedetto once wrote that “the wood which Pinocchio is carved in is that of mankind”.
Out of all the fables ever written, Pinocchio is perhaps the most comprehensive and the most painfully truthful. It comfortably belongs to the “black fable” genre of Orwell and its ruthlessness is only be equalled by “Animal Farm”. It’s the transparent filter of a humanity cast adrift, that lives in fear and ignorance of its own identity.
The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become man as we know him to be. We are reluctant to recognise ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character, we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently alive, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, the embarrassing appendix of an informant, but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognise ourselves in that imagined reflection - we cannot see the woodenness of his being, his chronic and incurable deceit or his disloyalty.

The snare
Who knows if Collodi, wherever he may be, is laughing or crying at the millions of readers, the countless generations of children around the world who are rocked to sleep by the enchanted words and images of his fable, without even knowing its real nature: a dark and pitiless parable of the human condition. However from the very beginning, the storyteller Collodi, warns us that a snare awaits us and that we will uncover the deception only when it is too late - once we have crossed the threshold of the promised fairy-tale world that opens with the fateful words: “once upon a time…”
It is as if Lorenzini was compelled to warn us against his own deception, bound to an unlikely deontology, that takes us back to Cat and the Fox.
Once we’ve crossed the threshold of the nursery tale, the tacit agreement with the reader is immediately upset and we find ourselves in the presence of a gruesome fable, with its ruthless and sublime irony. Reading it, the book opens up a threatening, splendid and ephemeral world that begins with a disturbing absence. There is not a King. The place of the King figure has been taken by the mass which is a joyfully plebeian crowd. The eternal dialectics between mass and individual, between destination and destiny, emerge and this tears our world apart.

The victim is always guilty
Pinocchio is any piece of wood that belongs to the pile. It is stuff that is destined to be destroyed and burnt, but it also longs to live. In this transformation the antagonists, represented by the Cat and the Fox have a providential, religious, ideological and theological nature.
The world is a mirror. Through its events and in its symbolic language that are made up of circumstances and meetings, it constantly gives out signals, clues and indications. If Pinocchio ( the ordinary human being ) could read them , he would not be so busy sabotaging his own being, he would not make the wrong choice at the crossroads of life and neither would he reject experience, in specious collaboration with error and misunderstanding.
The Cat, cruel and simple and the Fox, ironic and savage are two poetic criminal figures.
The characters in Pinocchio’s world are nothing other than projections of our imagination, figures that thanks to our strong belief in them, have ended up by haunting our world. The Cat and the Fox stand out more than all the others, with their physical deformities, a symbol of a putrid conscience that is disguised with cunning.
A strict deontology compels them to warn the victim with a thousand signals, contradictions and slips. In short they can rob someone who is determined to be robbed. This is why, one day, in all the law courts of an advanced humanity, we shall read in very large letters: “the victim is always guilty”.

The gospel according to Pinocchio
The initial idea, the suspicion that this story conceals a parable of human destiny, a gospel, a timeless Bible is reinforced and gains ground bit by bit as we continue to read. Mastro Ciliegia, a carpenter, is the first character to appear. The father figure is called Geppetto, a nickname for Giuseppe. Geppetto is not a carpenter but he has tools to cut wood. It is more than a coincidence. As we continue we discover the story has an inexhaustible number of symbols, riddles and allegories, and that under the wrinkled and tough exterior, the most famous puppet conceals the man in search of himself.
What a conjurer and an illusionist Lorenzini-Collodi is to conceal the truth under everyone’s nose. Pinocchio is born from a carpenter called Giuseppe or Geppetto. On top of this, he has a yellow wig on his head, that looks like a poor and hot “polenta”, it is true, but it is also similar to the golden colour of an aureole. Therefore… why did we not understand that… Pinocchio is… is…
Any piece of wood, a man of the crowd, the real KING-individual, becomes real. The magical project of our advancement is encapsulated in that fable like a gospel about the transformation of a puppet into a real man, of a being without will driven by strings of fortuity and mechanisation, into a free man who is the master of his destiny.

The birth of Pinocchio
Pinocchio is a fairy-tale character, like other magical figures, he comes into the world in one of those dark periods, into one of those infernal circles. Like Jesus Christ, who comes into the world in a shed looked after by animal warmth, Pinocchio is born into misery, surrounded by misfortune, “on a bad night in winter” ( my old book of Pinocchio, an edition of 1958, says: “a hellishly bad night”) amid thunder and lightening.
So we have another clue that shows that the fable, in the guise of a popular picaresque story, is actually an initiatory journey, that begins with our coming into the world, into this “valley of tears”. The symbolism is just too obvious.
In our societies, so-called civil societies, life begins according to one of the most brutal rituals.

Welcome to hell
Childbirth is painful, we are welcomed by the operating theatre’s blinding lights, by the doctors’ excited voices and by our mother’s screams, then we are spanked and put down on a cold surface, so we can say that from the very beginning everything appears as though we were truly “welcomed to hell”. It does not take much for the child to accept the discipline of the masters of misfortune or the instructions that will convince him that he has arrived on a dark planet where you are born to die and you live to suffer. In a world that is a “valley of tears”. In fact, our first sensation on being born is that of a terrible fear of suffocating, of being overwhelmed and dying. From then on everything that appears familiar to us has this sweetish taste of fear.

The imprinting of pain
This is how we - who for nine months of growth ( but in actual fact for an age) have been aquatic creatures, kings of a universe that is lukewarm, dimly-lighted, silent and liquid - meet fear as our first feeling and from that moment on, like the imprinting of a goose, we follow her as if she were our real procreator. Fear and pain soon limit the possibilities in a man’s life; an unreal hypnotic space, in which a man feels safe as if between the huge walls of a bunker that is half refuge and half prison.
The whole life of an ordinary man seems to be controlled by this first moment, by the experience of that liquid fire that he has felt enter his lungs in that terrifying passage from aquatic being to an air-breathing creature.
Like the salmon that goes against the river’s current to return to where it was it was born, we have a long journey to make to overcome the trauma created at our birth and make our way home again in search of a lost paradise.

The Pinocchios of Johannesburg
There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, there is an analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life. Pinocchio always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety, but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free.
He gets so used to lying that he is no longer able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong.
We’re like this. Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as Pinocchio’s. We’ve heard world leaders say these things, decade after decade, from Rio to Johannesburg. They are like the puppet on his first day at school, making false plans/promises about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate, poor, starving and oppressed of the world.

The animal that lies
Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to everyone around us because we think about our own personal interest. However, even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others.
This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest, just endless torment.

The cornerstone of research carried out by The European School of Economics, of which the Department of Sociology is a part, is the study of the individual and the discipline of self-observation or the study of ourselves.
The central element of this work is the study of lying.
Falsehood is a permanent state of the being, in which man has been “educated” throughout his life.
Man is a liar and only lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our lying that has enveloped us since birth, and the execution of a precise and monotonous script that we’ve brilliantly interpreted. The lie has become flesh. To leave the lie means to observe it and consequently to eradicate it.