Indicators of social problems: the spirit level, the society destroyed and healthcare role

• Published in: The Business & Management Review Vol. 10; no. 5; pp. 262 - 275
• Main Author: Pezzani, Fabrizio
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: London Centre for Business & Economic Research 01.12.2019
• Subjects: Economic crisis; Immigrants; Immigration; Income redistribution; Inequality; Noncitizens; Poverty; Society; Taxation; United States > US
• ISSN: 2047-2854; 2047-2862

We are facing an anthropological crisis, not economic. The debate on economics and its methods of study cannot be divorced from a correct reading of history that in the long term tends to repeat itself, as G.B. Vico had envisioned; the nature of man never changes, constantly oscillating between Cain and Abel, and it would seem that only pain leads man to wisdom. The single technical-rational thought makes us see the future as the only guarantee of success and we therefore cannot understand the correlations between causes and effects in our history. We act as if the past had been erased and as if history had never manifested similar situations to those in which we find ourselves today. The toxic consequences of this model are socio-cultural inequality, poverty, moral degradation, a raging and permanent conflict, lack of imagination and creativity. Is all this due to an incorrect adjustment of the markets (economic crisis) or to the end of a socio-cultural model incapable of responding to the problems of man as a person not as an object (anthropological crisis)? "Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty" (Caritas in veritate, chapter II, 21). The system taken to extremes created a concentration of financial wealth that is unparalleled in history with a sort of hegemonic senate that is superordinate to individual states. We have to return to the man and to a Welfare system in which healthcare is fundamental because in this way we can understand the solidarity and we can build a real "societas" - this world in old Latin means "alliance" - and this is a foundation of our happiness. The solution to our problems is not to be found in mechanistic rules outside of society but in the manner and socio-cultural policies aimed at reorienting the value systems of social life to try to rebuild the by-now forgotten reciprocal sense of solidarity; a society can only move forwards if it is based on familism principles and not on a war of everyone against everyone. Economics, if taken as a moral value, has betrayed its original role as a mechanism to respond to human needs, but has become an end in itself and an instrument of cultural domination that has led society to face the dilemma of its becoming. The idea of justice represented by a society of equals has been overridden by a society of unequals and the time has come to think of our time and redesign it; this is the real and absolute challenge we are facing.