Thinking global based on Edgar Morin (2015)
The Human as a Trinitarian Being
To live as a human being is to exist in tension between “I” and “We”. Life is a permanent movement, a back-and-forth between individuality and community. At times, the “I” is capable of sacrificing itself for the “We” — defending family, country, or loved ones. At other times, the “I” prioritizes its own survival, safety, or material interest.
Man is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. He carries within himself all possibilities — the worst and the best — and depending on circumstances, one or the other may emerge. As shown in social psychology, we often overestimate personality traits and underestimate the role of situations.
Human beings have a tendency to justify themselves while attributing evil, fault, or vice to others. To adopt a truly humanist conception of mankind, one must embrace complexity: recognizing multiplicity, ambiguity, and diversity. Without this education of self-knowledge, humanity risks remaining in ignorance of itself — a gap that leads to misunderstandings and destructive behaviors.
The Enemies of Understanding
Indifference, contempt, and hatred are the greatest barriers to understanding. To truly understand others requires more than intellect: it requires the recognition of our shared humanity and the respect of differences.
The first step is self-awareness. When we accept our own flaws, limitations, and vulnerabilities, we become more capable of accepting those of others. Understanding grows from humility.
To understand humanity, we must also accept uncertainty. Life itself is uncertain. Teaching and learning should prepare us to confront disorder, ambiguity, and probability, rather than locking us into rigid certainties.
Order (laws, rules, structures) combined with disorder (uncertainty, chance, possibility) creates organization — the dynamic emergence of life.
Evolution as Creation and Destruction
Every evolution is both the destruction of something old and the creation of something new. What begins as a deviation may grow, consolidate, and become a historical trend, eventually transforming into a powerful creative force.
Thinking globally means acknowledging improbability, discovery, and innovation. It means seeking unity while respecting diversity.
Today’s economic crisis cannot be reduced to financial dysfunctions: it is part of a much larger and multifaceted crisis — a crisis of civilization, of society, of humanity itself.
As Aldous Huxley observed: “Men do not learn much from the lessons of history, and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
Knowledge of the Whole
To know a whole requires more than knowledge of its individual parts. It also requires understanding the interactions, actions, and feedbacks that constantly circulate between the parts and the whole. This dynamic interplay — emergence — is at the heart of complexity.
Even a single word in a sentence has meaning only in its context. Without context, sense is distorted. Meaning is always versatile, ambivalent, and shifting.
It is organization that transforms fragments into a coherent whole. Complexity is nothing other than the degree of variety within a system, constantly shaped by probability and uncertainty.
Feedback and Human Systems
Negative feedback regulates and represses deviation, maintaining stability (laws, regulations, authority, social norms).
Positive feedback, on the other hand, allows deviations to expand, destabilizing the system but also creating new possibilities.
The key question is: which matters more — what we have preserved, or what we have lost? Every choice implies renunciation: to choose is to give up the rest.
An Open Future
Nothing guarantees that humanity has reached the full potential of its cerebral, intellectual, or creative abilities. Believing so would be nothing more than vanity or arrogance.
To think globally is therefore not only to embrace knowledge, but also to embrace uncertainty, humility, and the open-endedness of human destiny.
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