Politics & Institutions on Rielo Institute for Integral Development

The Last Carnival Dance

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is happiness? For much of the West, happiness is living in a society that’s like a massive amusement park—a noisy, colorful world where one can get by by hopping from one digital game to another, always young, always having fun, and always entertaining others. The progress of nations can only aim for this ultimate goal. After all, the great dream—“Make It Great Again”—is to expand the amusement park and equip it with even more beautiful and newer rides: if possible, without having to pay for them. Certainly, the land of milk and honey, the Shangri-La, is threatened by villains, terrorists, migrants, and the world’s poor. But let them stay out. A good whack with a baton will be enough to make them flee, or a nice deportation program—an expression of the great charity of Western thought. We have degraded ourselves so much that we have reached our lowest point. The Land of Plenty, Shangri-La—if you look closely—seems more like a ballroom with a broken heater, where worn-out seniors with dyed hair are still looking for a dance partner. With ordinary, worn-out music.

Individualism and Human Rights

Angel Rodriguez Guerro PhD — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary secularism’s attempt to eliminate God from public life has also led to the erasure of the concrete human person from that sphere and his replacement with a legal abstraction that dissolves under analysis and criticism. It is doubtful that human beings can establish a code that effectively protects their lives and rights if they overlook the most fundamental aspect of that life: that it is a gift, not just any available good, and that man is not the master of the universe but a contingent being and a creature.

Global Public Health Issues

Maurizio Marceca MD — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

...Bearing in mind that among the most widely accepted definitions of public health are: “The science and art of improving the health of the population through organized societal efforts” (Acheson, 1988; WHO, 2000), but also: “ The process of mobilizing the local, regional, national, and international resources necessary to ensure the conditions under which all people can be in good health” (Breslow and Detels, 1991), it is clear that we are essentially talking about something very important and very complex, all the more so if the reference framework adopted is the global one—that is, one that concerns the health of all peoples across the entire planet.

The Freedom That Kills

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

According to Pavel Florensky¹, the “fundamental difficulty” of ancient metaphysics lies in how to reconcile unity with multiplicity.

Applied to the field of politics, this means figuring out how to integrate the unity of a nation, an institution, or a people with the multiplicity and pluralism of the differences that are part of it—namely, citizens, intermediate institutions, ethnic groups, and minorities.

A major transformation has taken place: for Plotinus, the One preceded being in ontological dignity. For postmodernists, all reality is an infinite difference where richness consists in not participating in a universal—that is, in nothing that is common to all.

With fond memories of Delors

Silvia Gonzalez Perez PhD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1996, UNESCO released the Delors Report “Learning: The Treasure Within” prepared by a commission of experts from various countries (educators, sociologists, political scientists, among others) led by Jacques Delors, which stated that students should learn to be, to do, to know, and to live together; and that education was a necessary utopia and an expression of love for children and adolescents, for whom the path to building a better future should be paved; We in the education sector felt inspired; we believed that a new era was dawning, in which all stakeholders—educational institutions, governments, international organizations, students, and teachers—would join forces to transform education into a driving force for human and social development.

The Neo-Feudalism to Come

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is highly likely that in the future—with artificial intelligence surpassing and replacing our own, and robots taking our jobs—our lives will be reduced, at least in Western countries, to that of mere consumers of mass media content. But this is the positive scenario, the best-case scenario. There is worse. Mass media content is, in fact, produced because there are those who, in one form or another, pay for its consumption—that is, purchase it. But if robots replace physical labor and AI replaces intellectual labor, then the production of wealth will remain in the hands of our artificial counterparts. The market will become a matter of buying and selling between computers and robots. Humans will be excluded from the production cycle and, consequently, from remuneration. The capitalist economy will change profoundly. We will no longer be able to acquire mass media content because we will have nothing with which to exchange for the purchase. The market—the omnipresent, omnipotent market—will remain only a memory of the past, because society will revert to a feudal system in the hands of those few who control robots and AI. It appears that Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will build 1,000,000 Optimus all-purpose robots by 2030. Now, while it is true that scientific discoveries of the past have always required human personnel, it seems that robots are now crossing the line: if they can replicate every aspect of humans, then they can replace the human workforce.

The Barren Tree of Democracy

Sarah Pattison PhD — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The world is hungry. We hunger for justice and peace. We are born into a state of hunger, cut off from our mother and turned out to a cruel world as orphaned beggars. We are robbed daily of our peace. Our energy and joy are eaten day and night to fuel the extracting machines of this world: industrialism, capitalism, consumerism. Brutalized, where in this world can we turn for justice? No where. Checks on executive power weaken with each social media proclamation, judicial bias has been bought stock and trade, due process is a false and flimsy veil over systemic corruption. Justice is bartered at the money changers’ tables beneath the ivory towers of our governments and the price is steep!

I want to know if justice is possible…

Cristina Scorrano — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This famous verse by David Maria Turoldo introduces this brief – and certainly not exhaustive – reflection on ‘justice’, a theme that is often at the heart of debates and demands. Let us ask ourselves what the meaning of the term “justice” is in a globalised, multicultural society dominated by market forces and technology, and, above all, on what foundation can the concept of “justice” be anchored if religious and moral references are no longer valid or shared? Is a society that speaks the language of weapons just? These days, the terms most frequently heard in public debate are those relating to war, violence, the death of innocent people, and armed attacks. It seems that humanity is prey to an insatiable thirst for power and is capable only of devising plans for destruction, aggression, and the invasion of spaces belonging to others. Pope Leo XIV, too, in the Angelus on Sunday 15 March, drew attention to the “dramatic situations of injustice, violence and suffering that mark our times”.

The relentless cycle of pain

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Innocence to be regained

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After the Second World War we witnessed the aggregation of local markets into universal markets. This trend was driven by at least two postulates: that the market for all would be the secret formula for success and that a liberal guiding nation had been given the mission from heaven to lay down the rules and set the game.

Aggregation was seen as a good thing, as progress exported to peoples who, while maintaining a certain identity of their own, finally accepted the idea that their world was not the ‘right’ one, but that what was right was aggregation behind a demigod-nation that would lead everyone to the highest peaks. So, union of markets and hegemony of a nation.