Let’s design hope
Let’s design hope
Yes to saying that beauty will save the world, a phrase taken from the original of the French title “Les Aventuriers de l’absolu”, i.e. Adventurers of the Absolute, of an essay by the Bulgarian philosopher Cvetan Todorov.
Looking around, the rare sources of beauty we observe almost all come from nature and, more rarely, from the great inspirations of artists who, with their art, have become interpreters of admirable syntheses of forms and substances that embody the splendor of nature .
Furthermore, in the stress of common life, in the worries, we often see ugliness, degradation, poverty, etc.
But what exactly is beauty?
In fact, beauty is defined as an abstract concept, generally defined as the quality of something that is perceived (especially by sight and hearing) and provides a lasting sensation of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction.
It is often considered a part of aesthetics, culture, social psychology, philosophy and sociology.
Beauty, along with truth and goodness, is one of the transcendentals, which are often considered the three fundamental concepts of human understanding.
Yet if we dig deeper into the concept of beauty we must ask ourselves why we perceive many aspects of Nature as beautiful (a starry vault, a sunset, the shape of a flower, a landscape, the chirping of birds, etc.) and as ugly (which is the opposite of beautiful) the chaos of a city, incorrect human behavior, the degradation of a landscape destroyed or devastated by human activities, etc.
The answer is often simpler than it appears (and on which we would risk building complex and even complicated philosophical and deductive paths).
The truth is that Nature has its own logic, both microscopically and macroscopically.
Thus from the observation, through quantum physics, of the most imperceptible realities, up to those linked to the most macroscopic aspects of nature’s biodiversity, to arrive at the immensities of spacetime, even if apparently distant from each other, everything is one (to put it as the title of Michael Talbot’s 1991 work, published in Italy in 1997).
In fact, there is a similarity, or if we prefer, a macroscopic supersymmetry, whereby the micro and the macro are connected in such interesting and structurally similar ways that we understand that the entire architecture of the reality in which we are immersed, both of all similar to the structure of a fractal, where from the most microscopic (or subatomic) levels to those most evident to our senses, there is an internal homothety.
That is, we are faced with a conformation in which the structure of reality is repeated in its form in the same way on different scales.
This characteristic is often called self-similarity or self-similarity. To be clear, the term fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoît Mandelbrot in the book Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension to describe some mathematical behaviors that seemed to have a “chaotic” behavior but which in fact are not.
When we observe a fractal we have the impression of looking at a work of art and, in fact, it is.
Nature in them, and in all the organizations of life, has created harmonies, synchronies, beauty (the bronchial system, leaf structures, etc., are fractal representations).
It can be said that the criteria of beauty are inherent in the principles and codes of Nature; outside of it everything is ugly and the further we move away from it, the more we perceive a growing discomfort up to sensations such as horror and terror.
To return, briefly, to the title, it is clear that only through beauty can we plan a future of hope, trust and positive expectation.
It means reconverting the ugly into beautiful, transforming what is outside the rules and principles of nature into its codes.
It means moving towards a humanity that makes the rules of nature its way of being, of doing politics, science, technology, economics and society.
To do this we need to teach, starting from the little ones, the rules of nature that make partnership, sharing, synchrony, the right of everyone, regardless of “weight and appearance”, the law from which beauty is born.
We need to humanize sustainability and to humanize it we need to introduce the DNA of Nature into all human activities. Without it everything fails, from politics to a child’s play, generating wars, devastation, horrors and terror.
Let’s regain hope starting from the beauty of Nature.
Guido Bissanti