The twilight of the gods

The twilight of the gods

The twilight of the gods (from the German Götterdämmerung, in turn derived from the ancient Norse ragnarökkr “darkness, night of the gods”) represents, in Norse mythology, the end of the world, described extensively in the Völuspá (The prophecy of the seer) which is the first and most famous poem of the poetic Edda.
For the record, the poetic Edda (Eddukvæði) is a collection of poems in Old Norse, taken from the medieval Icelandic manuscript Codex Regius, one of the most important sources of information available to us on Norse mythology and the legends of Germanic heroes.
Without going into the development, all to be read, of this mythological treatise, it tells the story of the creation of the world and its future end, not intended as a physical end but as an end of identity.
So much so that after the end of this world, another will arise where the human couple of the legend (Sif and Sifthrasit), who survived the catastrophe, will give rise to a new human race, and a new era will unfold under the sovereignty of Baldr resurrected.
The twilight of the gods is, moreover, for prose and music lovers, the fourth and last of the musical dramas that make up the tetralogy: The Ring of the Nibelung, by Richard Wagner.
Beyond the eschatological message of this narrative, very common to other religions, especially the Jewish-Christian one, the twilight of the gods already makes us foresee the end of something; this (apparent) light that becomes more and more faint to announce a new era.
Leaving the legend and the metaphor and going to the present day, the step is shorter than you think.
From the dominant information, to the shouted and fought politics in the borders of much of our world, we have been given a scenario of injustice, prevarication, dominance and abuse, where, as usual, those who pay are always the last: the most fragile, the speechless, the marginalized of a civilization which, in the name of liberalism (oxymoron of true freedom), moves according to diametrically opposed logics and principles and, therefore, in contrast with the laws of nature.
As it happens, the most striking effects of this contrast are today, increasingly, visible in the increase in poverty (not so much and only material but also cultural ones), in the loss of biodiversity, in the decrease of renewable resources and their availability, above all in the suburbs and marginal areas of this planet.
These are the effects of an erroneous cultural, economic, and therefore political theorem, from which that tree of materialism of the last century was born, and unfortunately increased, from which the branches of extremism of the right and left have developed.
An erroneous ideological and economic theorem that has generated in the last times of our modern history that liberalism, presented by its proponents as the solution for the rights of peoples and their economies, but heavily collapsed (gradually and exponentially) under the weight of its mammoth theoretical and therefore practical incongruity.
There is no such thing in Nature. Living beings, the flow of energies, the relationship between them, their relationships, move on those criteria of reciprocity, sharing, collaboration and synergy that have no correspondence in the liberal laws from which many of the legislative rules were born. and constitutional of modern democracies. Just think of the European Union itself.

The same laws of physics, which govern every quark in the universe and in our world, do not find any correspondence in the homologating model of liberalism.
For too long we have built gods whose light is gradually fading and bringing with it that ideological and political darkness that we have been witnessing especially in recent times.
Faced with this apparently apocalyptic (and in some ways eschatological) scenario, the twilight of the gods is welcome. The end of an idea of ​​history that, beyond having brought us here, has nothing more to say and to give us and, above all, no longer has the energy to make another history.
At the point where we are we find ourselves, faced with so much disorientation and, often and unfortunately, so many negativities, we are presented with an exasperated, tired, frightened civilization and, too often (for my taste) violent and controversial: crushed and intoxicated they are all the dross of that historical entropy released in abundance precisely by the liberal machine.
We have succeeded in creating cultural, political, ideological and productive models which, in the name of liberalism, have pitted us against each other; exasperating concepts such as competition, free market, competition, etc. and abandoning those qualities that create beauty, harmony and balance in Nature: reciprocity, sharing, collaboration, cooperation, etc.
Not an easy task awaits us but we have a path outlined; is the path indicated by nature, with its rules and principles, where every weight is shared as much as possible, every competence is distributed among several parts, where every responsibility is shared and every living being, from the most insignificant to the most striking, not for its weight and size but for its role.
So from agriculture to energy sources, from services to commercial systems, and so on, if we don’t apply these rules, we can’t turn the page; we must definitively abandon the twilight of those gods in whom we have believed for too long and from whom we have never had any light.
To do this we must open ourselves to the light of a new world. We need to start speaking a new language which, to put it like Mahatma Gandhi, is as old as the mountains. The same language spoken, from its origins, from the natural world, of which we are children and in which, whether we like it or not, we must return.
In Italy (and in other parts of the world) we are preparing for a new political season. To new elections and, unfortunately and often, to new populist proposals (in the most negative sense of the term), to new promises and new decoy.
The only real thing and commitment that we must ask of our candidates (and future representatives) must be how they intend to respect the rules of our mother nature and, above all, how to concretely achieve these goals and programs.
From the tone of the answers (and from their knowledge and awareness on the subject) we can make our choices.
The rest is just demagoguery, electoral propaganda and the satisfaction of our discontent and our selfishness but the planet (and our future) cannot wait any longer.

Guido Bissanti