La libertà generativa

[Autom. eng. transl.] The yearning for freedom has crossed the whole history of humanity. The desire and the will to be free has produced political movements, legal systems and economic systems; has changed behaviors, traditions and customs; has generated symbols, ideas and cultural identities. Today, however, Western society has the ostensible presumption of defining itself as a genuinely free society. Starting from this assumption, one of today's most important intellectuals, Zygmunt Bauman, the theorist of the liquid society, and the sociologists Mauro Magarti and Chiara Giaccardi reflect on the paradoxical outcome that the powerful economic development of the last forty years has had. On the one hand, it has undoubtedly expanded the freedom of human beings because it has dramatically increased the potential of choice of the individual and has removed a part of humanity from the millennial constraints imposed by nature; on the other hand, however, he has caged modern man in a radically individualistic conception of human existence, ending up making him a prisoner of consumerism, of techno-economic apparatuses and of the will to affirm himself. So what does it mean to be free? Never before today, faced with the profound social, cultural and economic changes that are characterizing the contemporary world, it is important to ask ourselves this question. Because, after all, as Bauman wrote "freedom is our destiny: a fate that cannot be ignored and never abandons us".