Category: Blog

One of the things that worries me so much about nazism is that we think we are better, that we won’t do the same mistake.

The problem, though, is that we didn’t take a vaccine against nazism. We are obviously against its results but what can we say about our ability to avoid that outcome?

We think we are immune to it, but in fact there is no direct learning that we had in the past to prove that we have stepped up from the level that made nazism possible.

Thinking like this doesn’t allow us to be critic towards ourselves and to try to understand if we would be vulnerable to the kind of thinking that made nazism possible.
What allowed nazism to flourish in the beginning was the ultimate idea, and the fascination of,  that we could build a better world by sacrificing a small piece of our individual humanity.

This is the part we are not immune of. Right now we still think that there is a Top-Level citizen and a Low-level citizen, and that we deserve to be in the top one.
We think there are countries that are “less worthy”, not from a money point of view.
We think that there are people better than others.

That there is a clear distinction between the good people (implicitly “us”) and the bad ones.
And while I could even agree that from a human standpoint there are more altruistic people, more egoistic one, people more inclined to doing good and other more inclined to hurt the society, this still doesn’t allow thinking that we can sacrifice people for a greater good.

That greater good that sound so fantastic, that dream, is what nazism was partly about, it was the concept, the idea, that we could split the world into the worthy and the unworthy, was the distinction between “ours” and “them”, but we were all born equals.

The greater good is learning that we are all the same people under this big roof called earth.
Accepting that, and learning that there is a slippery slope that will try to trick us into thinking we are so better  (while we’re not), is the second step.

I was in a ryanair air flight yesterday and the stuart started making some jokes with one of the hostess..
There were 2 stuart in that moment and what happened is that they “settled”, by forcing her to do something while joking.

As men, I think we do this quite often. We use the herd to force decisions onto other people and, what’s even worse, we use jokes to feel less guilt.

I think that guilt should be a signal. If we are unable to sustain your actions, to live through them, then you’re trying to hide the guilt, and if you’re doing that, chances are you’re already commiting some kind of “crime”.

Be honest and live through each and every action, because you’ll take them together with you.

Keep a travel box, with memories from old travels, it’ll allow you to open a door in the past, blasting yourself into a moment in time, remembering the trip on the japanese shinkansen or the fuerteventura restaurant 😉

What skills do you have? Maybe you’re used to value them based on what you write on paper, confronting them with another list, maybe a bigger list of words.

Yes, words matter, because you should know them. But a skill is not made of words alone, there’s more than it meets the eye.

A skill is your ability to interpret a problem, to think through it, to manage the stress or find a compromise. A skill is something that can hardly be defined and written into a CV, mostly because this kind of skill isn’t something you can describe.

It’s your culture, it’s your vision, it’s how you interact with the world, it’s made by the values you believe in and the things you cannot accept.

This, as a whole, is your skill.

You need courage to show up each day, do the work, and do it well.

You need courage and good communication to do it everyday, because each day the lazyness will kick in, you’ll forget the goals, and your so called ambition will slow down unless you have big stakes.

Or maybe it’s not about courage. It’s about persistence, endurance.