We have lost our sense of limits

Among the things we should rediscover and reevaluate about Greek culture is the fixed idea, which has permeated the great classics of tragedy—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—as well as philosophical thought, from Plato to Aristotle, of the need to know one's own limits and not to go beyond them.

The two passages are in fact linked, held together by a single existential thread: the Greeks, long before the Enlightenment, had carved at the entrance to the sanctuary of Delphi a stentorian appeal, a commandment: Know thyself. And this “knowledge” of oneself, and here we are before Christianity, means first of all being aware of one’s own limits, not exceeding them, by virtue of the ability to be able to give an answer to questions of meaning (who am I, what place do I have in the world, where am I going).

Once you have identified your own limit, also in relation to the progress of technology (about whose risks the Greeks knew a lot), comes the second step: do not exceed it, blinded by the hybris, that delusion of omnipotence that leads you to consider yourself invincible, invincible, and as such able to do whatever you want, in private as well as when you have a public responsibility. Prometheus, symbol of technological progress, with his myth, slips into the darkness of hubris and for this sin is chained and condemned to eternal suffering.

Greek tragedy, along with all its classics, is a long narrative in the sinful realm of hubris, an endless story of transgressions against the limits each of us is called to respect. And all the sciences the Greeks invented with their Great Masters (medicine with Hippocrates, mathematics with Pythagoras, physics with Archimedes, astronomy with Ptolemy) were always framed within a framework that always contained a limit that could not be crossed.

The West has lost its sense of limits, both in private and public life. Everyone feels free to write their own laws, their own codes, their own (unlimited) ambitions, and the widespread violence is nothing more than the language with which to measure hubris and assert it at any cost. Man is no longer within a system dominated by order, balance, and the unchangeable laws of nature: he pursues eternity already in life, obsessed by a narrow representation of well-being and living well, in which there is no room even for the mere thought of death. Technology (now it's technology), combined with the power of money, is no longer, as Aeschylus said, , but it marches swiftly, without any ethics of limits, up to the goal of replacing human and natural intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Autocrats' thirst for power, devoid of any sense of limits, allows them to decide, with complete autonomy, when and how to unleash wars that seem distant but are, by force, part of the common destiny of the globalized world. Poverty, like hunger, is not frightening: it is part of the destiny that humanity, always ready to overcome limits, considers inescapable. In the reign of hubris, there can be no room for the centuries-long struggles of democratic representation (voting, in itself, is no guarantee of democracy, as demonstrated by the many states controlled by regimes in which, in appearance, elections exist). The institutional architecture of pacifist multilateralism has disintegrated, and of the vital bodies of this system—think of the UN—only the remains of ghosts remain. Disorder is the product of an arrogance that denies the very concept of balance. polis and the underlying polyarchy: no one can become too dominant, because that opens the door to tyranny and shatters the balance of a community. Unaware of our place in the world, and the boundary we should never cross, we find ourselves, like in the parable of the blind men frescoed by the genius of Pieter Bruegel, walking toward a precipice where sooner or later we are condemned to fall.

• Humility is hard work, but it's worth it
• Changing yourself is the main lever to change the world (Martin Buber)
• Simplicity indicates the value of a person