The Good Life

Socrates was the first to turn the gaze of Greek philosophy towards human life, towards the everyday life of his fellow citizens. The “good life” and how to achieve it was the main beacon that guided his thought. Deep down, isn't that what we all ultimately want? To be happy by distancing ourselves from suffering, but do we achieve it? I believe not always, or at least not as much as we would like.

Do we suffer in our lives? Do we experience all kinds of crises? I believe so. Do we have crises of meaning about what we do, about what we want, or in what we believe? Do we suffer crises in our most important relationships? Personal crises? Professional, social, and economic crises? Just take a look at our society to realize it. That “good life” that Socrates sought often seems somewhat elusive. Perhaps it's that we don't know how to do it well. It could even be thought that, perhaps, as a species, it was not possible for us to reach that ideal.

But… What if those crises were not really personal crises? What if the ultimate cause of the problems we suffer and live, in reality, was not within us but in our culture? What if the solution to most of these crises were within our reach?

I invite you today to join me on a reflective journey with the sole hope of seducing you. To seduce you to enter a process that broadens your gaze and find, by yourselves, tools to transform your lives in favor of that Socratic ideal of the “good life”. Of course, if you venture to join me, we will have to walk slowly, step by step. It is not flat or easy terrain, but great rewards, I like to think, are not usually obtained without committing effort, courage, and trust.

Do you accept the challenge? What can you lose?

Paradigms

Let’s first talk about human beings and how we make sense of the world we live in. We generate knowledge of all kinds and in all possible fields. This knowledge that we generate is not chaotically piled up, but rather organized into schemes, into structures that we can call paradigms. A paradigm, then, is nothing more than the way in which we structure human knowledge, defining, by extension, a particular way of understanding a certain aspect of reality.

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All civilizations have built all their forms of knowledge in this way, through a set of beliefs or theories that have allowed them to explain the meaning of their reality, of what they lived, of the why of this or that.

Humans have created multiple paradigms for all the disciplines of human knowledge, from the sciences to religions, and the important thing is to imagine that all of them are ultimately based on some basic premises, some fundamental premises, that arise from the answer to two great questions:

What is reality? and What is the human being?

For example, we intuit, in architecture, that the foundations of a building and how these are designed, will condition the subsequent construction, significantly marking what will and will not be possible for that building in question, in terms of height, spaces, rooms, and perhaps even its exterior beauty. In the same way, one can also quickly intuit that these two fundamental questions about reality and the human being are not trivial questions, since, depending on how each civilization answers them, it will condition all other forms of knowledge subsequently developed.

To these basic premises, to these foundations of knowledge, we call it Base Paradigm. A Base Paradigm is also a paradigm, like the others belonging to the different disciplines of knowledge, but this one has a superior status, since it feeds and supports all the others. This Base Paradigm is the ground, the base from which all other paradigms are supported. Let's say they are basic beliefs that we share in a culture and make us look, give meaning and, ultimately act, in the face of the reality we live in.

Paradigms tend to be invisible to the subject who sustains them since they are born and live within them, in