It seems that so-called political realism is in vogue, i.e., that there are no laws or rules to protect us, but that it is only important to know how to navigate the conflictual sea of reality, where nothing but force and power make sense. That men, after such a long journey, return to the club, the stone, and the machete is indicative of a regression to the devastating powers of instinct, but also of an intolerance towards what had been the liberal canon in recent years, made up of a dense web of rights, which, however, had been transformed into the garment that Deianira sent to Hercules, a garment soaked in the poison of Naxos. Poison that killed Heracles.
So it was with a dense legal network which, in the name of absolute rights, in reality resulted in a multiplication of prohibitions. Rules, then, in the hands of pale and bloodless jurists, who, out of obedience to abstract rights, exhausted real men.
But returning to the axe and the machete was the biggest mistake. Because the great cycle begins again, that of violence, pain, the memory of it, the memory that drives revenge. Death that attracts death. Pain that invites more pain into man.
Man is cowardly in his fundamental structure, but in terms of knowledge, he cannot escape a logic of identity, sic et non. Without understanding that the conditions of truth or falsehood are secondary to those of transcendence and immanence. Yes, man needs to look at the sky. Beyond himself. The super substance. And drink from the world beyond. The greatest mistake was to apply the logic of worldly things, of the provincial village, of the ideas of the village and the square, to that desire to go beyond, which is our most authentic depth.
Instead, on the border against the peasants of the other village across the river, we continue to raise our voices, shout, and throw stones, while they do the same to us. Naturally, we apply our poor intelligence to increasingly cunning stratagems and increasingly lethal weapons.
The last few centuries have seen the exaltation of the immanence of the world —which is seen without any aspiration—against a higher world. But immanence is insipid and dreamless, and to think that a dense network of liberal laws alone would have arrested instinctual passions was supreme wishful thinking. Rules, laws, and codes cannot be the dream of a lifetime; at best, they can be a set of traffic rules indicating how to park or cross an intersection. But the dream, the great dream of life, is something else entirely. They wanted us to believe that this set of traffic rules was our goal. Instead, that was the beginning of our end. A melancholic question germinates in the heart: how many generations will have to suffer? And how many, once the violence is over, will have to stiffen again in the cold white room of immanence?