WORLD SOCIAL SUMMIT 2008
'WSS: Maffesoli, do not fear fear'

"It is important to fight the fear of fear" the sociologist and journalist Michel Maffeli opens with these words his speech during the World Social Summit held in Rome until tomorrow. Maffesoli does an excursus on modern and contemporary thought in order to give a reading key to today's fears. "Where does this fear tormenting our head come from?" he asks. "There are two imaginary elements that corrode man kind, which can be summarized in a paradigm, according to which a solution exists, and a tragic paradigm that sees no solution: in a word, you must live with it". Within this context "the fact of being reborn would be a tragic paradigm". The tragic paradigm has three characteristics: the first consists "in taking care of the health, basically: heal from life". The second characteristic is that "there is a possible way out that activated individual and collective energies". The third characteristic is that "dialectics is based on the Hegelian concept of overcoming: overcome the sin, the evil, to attain a perfect society, where evil does not exist".

"There is a process of metamorphosis that is taking place, a weakness of institutions which have no longer an attractive power, which were ideologies in the past, as Marxism".

"Interactive communication means play a role covered by orgies in the Greek world and the feasts that Durkheim compared to the Aristotelian idea of purification" in a few words "they overdramatize and purify".

Today "we must not fear "fear", we must live it, face a current process, accept the tragic, no longer the solution, but the tragic lived as such, the "do with" preached by ancient populations, "the good use of this and that", and do not give in". In conclusion, a question: "what would a man be without his shadow, without his fear?".