My dear readers, I must apologize for having deserted all of you for more than two long weeks. Someone has already complained. You are right but I have been traveling across Europe all the time and still haven’t understood how I can access my blog with my blackberry. Can anybody help?
Along with my technological ignorance, my mood decided to play hard and plunged me in to a dark depression. I reached the peak when I met Adelina (von Fuerstenberg) again. She is like a mother: lovely and tough. She enlightened me when she told me I’ve become too ‘professional’, just concerned with results and resources like a banker… dressed to kill!
She is right. I work in the third sector but have become a slave of the city, obsessed with inputs and outputs. This is London but it’s not what I am.
My ruthless Adelina didn’t take the moral ground. On the contrary she was very pragmatic. Correctly she stressed that I’m not like the heavyweights who look only at money. I will never become one of them. So I have do develop other means to succeed. I need a different strategy – “If you can’t force or buy people, you must seduce them or make them dream”
She was so right! I had forgotten that we have soft power – see Joseph Nye. This is the USB of people like me. She recommend some good books and added another pearl of wisdom: ‘Don’t confuse seduction, charm and dream. You can’t seduce people learning how to do it. It’s a technique. You can charm them but this is a natural talent. You either have it or not. Otherwise you can make them dream like an artist or a poet but you must dream first of all. Dreams are not marketing products.’
My new summer resolution is to rediscover my real self – Nietzsche would be proud of me. Get read of la pense’ unique (the unique economic thinking) to rediscover the non-pragmatic side of myself and life. Stop commercializing everything and turning life in to a mall. Get rid of London and practice unproductive conversations and different ways for human relationships. I’m not commercial and never have been. I’m a fu**ing odd character who writes poetry and is obsessed with Brazilians, not a boring salesman!
I won’t return back to the nostalgic World Social Forum crowd. I have already done that and it’s not very productive. They want to replace an ideology with an older one, one that is moreover defeated by history. On the other hand, there are emerging alternatives: social innovation, sustainability, renewable energies, slow food, fair trade, microcredit, free software… antagonistic pornography and the European Union.
There are champions and innovative organisations but they are disconnected and without a shared vision for the future. This is my mission: to connect them with each other and intellectuals to draft a shared vision, and artists like Adelina to create a new imagery to show themselves working together with their peers for a new world. I change my uniform and now I’m dress to thrill!
I want to leave with my pearl of wisdom you can use everytime you get in to a conversation with old fashioned fundamentalists: in an ‘input-output’ analysis of life you realize that whatever inputs you put in the output is always the same: death!
