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Are freedom and friendship still meaningful in our meaningless world?

 

This column marks the sixth anniversary since in June 2003 we decided to write a weekly commentary and to send it, always free of charge, to whoever wanted to read it or published. Thanks, indeed, to all the readers and to all the editors who make this dialogue possible, week after week.

During the past six years many things have changed, but I think that one of the most notable changes is the fact that now we live in the transition to a new model for our country, a model where old paradigms won’t work and where new values will emerge and eventually triumph.

At the same time, this new model for our country is possible only in the context of our post-modern, globalized, and technological world, where we are everyday challenged and surprised by paradoxes and self-contradictions, the lack of direction, and the re-definition of words and social structures that just a short time ago nobody thought needed a new definition.

Think, for example, about two important words that now have new definitions that, for those of us who still mentally belong to a time long gone (at least, that’s the usual accusation against us), seem to be totally inappropriate and a total distortion of the original meaning of those words.

In the past, “friend” was a person who, not being part of the family, was still very much part of our mental and emotional lives, and whose presence (regardless of the physical distance) was enough to make us feel better and even to make us better persons.

“Friend” was not just any person, but only those with whom we shared a part of ourselves and who in turn shared with us a part of ourselves. That’s why Aristotle said that a true friend was “a soul in two bodies,” thus emphasizes the undeniable existential connection proper of the true friendship.

In our time, however, “friend” is simply somebody whose name and phone number we include in our calling list. That’s why phone companies have “plans for family and friends.” Even worst, “friend” is somebody who we include in our web page of a social network that will proudly say that “So-and-so is now friend with So-and-So,” as if friendship was the result of a couple of clicks on the links of a page in Internet.

Let’s think now about “freedom.” Last week I watched a TV documentary produced in Argentina about what “freedom” means for the generations born in Argentina after the tragic times of the military dictatorship during the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

For those generations, according to that program, “freedom” means divorce, abortion, gay marriage, use of marijuana, and nudism.

None of those interviewed said that “freedom” was the opposite of “slavery,” and none of those explored the possibility of “freedom” being more than just new laws that will legalize some behaviors that were previously banned.

The devaluation of the notions of “freedom” and “friendship” will inexorably lead us to live a devaluated life.

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