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Anything goes to satisfy the desires and whims of a very small percentage of society that is voracious, selfish and greedy and uses all the power it has to repress and stifle what it does not like.
These are not good times for critical thinking, or even for thinking itself. Karl Popper's paradox becomes more evident every day: if a society is infinitely tolerant, its capacity to be tolerant will eventually be reduced or destroyed by the intolerant, therefore, paradoxically as it may seem, to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Intolerance is ignorance and in times when we have more technology at our disposal than ever, there are more communication problems; in a time when we can access more information than ever, we are more uninformed because we cannot give veracity to anything that comes to us through media that are totally servile to the power that subsidizes them.
We do not know what this new year will bring us, but nothing seems to think that we are in a position to be able to end the armed conflicts that plague the planet, among other things, because it is important that they exist and that they increase since they are the business of a few that costs the lives of many of us.
The history of humanity has always had turbulent times and now we are in a very uncertain and disappointing time, but humanity itself, when it has found itself in this dead end, has looked back many times and has sought inspiration and answers in the classics.
On a day like today in 106 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and Academic Skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire, one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists who wrote a masterpiece called Laelius De Amicitia, a treatise on friendship that is always required reading.
The Grandma is a lover of Latin culture and language and this is one of her favourite works.
Laelius de Amicitia (or simply De Amicitia) is a treatise on friendship (amicitia) by the Roman statesman and author Marcus Tullius Cicero, written in 44 BC.
The work is written as a dialogue between prominent figures of the Middle Roman Republic and is set after the death of the younger Scipio Africanus (otherwise known as Scipio Aemilianus, Scipio Africanus Minor or Scipio the Younger) in 129 BC. The interlocutors of the dialogue chosen by Cicero are Gaius Laelius, a close friend of the late statesman, and Laelius's two sons-in-law, Gaius Fannius, and Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Cicero in his youth knew Scaevola and states that Scaevola described to him the substance of the conversation on Friendship which he and Fannius had held with Laelius a few days after the death of Scipio.
De Amicitia is addressed to Atticus, who, as Cicero tells him in his dedication, could not fail to discover his own portrait in the study of a perfect friend.
In the dialogue Fannius, the historian, and Mucius Scaevola, the Augur, both sons-in-law of Laelius, pay him a visit immediately after the sudden and suspicious death of Scipio Africanus.
The loss which Laelius had thus sustained leads to a eulogy on the virtues of the departed hero, and to a discussion on the nature of their friendship.
Many of the sentiments which Laelius utters are declared by Scaevola to have originally flowed from Scipio, with whom the nature and laws of friendship formed a favourite topic of discourse.
But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle -friendship can only exist between good men. We mean then by the "good" those whose actions and lives leave no question as to their honour, purity, equity, and liberality; who are free from greed, lust, and violence; and who have the courage of their convictions.
More information: Medium
mutual sympathy between them,
each supplying what the other lacks
and trying to benefit the other,
always using friendly and sincere words.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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