2. Facing the complexity of reality

But having reached that point, the inevitable question arises: what can we actually do in the face of so much suffering? If we really are capable of coming face to face with the complexity of reality without taking refuge in easy simplifications and limitations, the questions form a chain, one linking to the other: should we look after the specific human beings who need to receive help without delay, or should we try to fight against the underlying causes of poverty, injustice and violence? Within the grounds of these causes, what is more decisive, the perverse political-economical structures, or the insensitivity, ambition and lust for power of the leaders of these alienating systems? What are the limits of the necessary economic and technological aid to the peoples of the developing world, communities who often have a surprising joy for life despite their poverty, a joy so often absent in our developed consumer society? How do we make progress in conflict prevention, devoting greater resources to this task whilst not failing to rectify the consequences of those we have not been able or known how to avoid. How do we slow down and re-route the growing inequality between rich and poor countries and prevent the terrible genocide that is perpetrated beyond our borders, without evading our own, more immediate social reality where there are always unmet needs? How to link all these social tasks with the protection of sister-mother earth, which at this critical moment needs to be preserved and cared for by humankind and upon which at the same time we are all totally dependent? How to be bearers of hope in the inferno of torture and the most inhumane cruelty? How and where to consolidate our own lives so that the situations in which we aim to exercise some influence do not destroy us? How to harmonize all these opposites? How to be effective without succumbing to the tyranny of ‘usefulness’ that reduces solidarity to measurable results? How to share in the fate of those we cannot help, because the weapons used or at least tolerated out of self-interest by those who decide which peoples fit and which are ‘unnecessary’ in the new international order, stop us from doing so? How to prevent the necessary process of specialization from fragmenting the essential global perception of reality?