Discovery is born of curiosity, curiosity being the daughter of doubt, the awareness that we know nothing (or little) about the world that surrounds us or that could surround us. This is why we continue to wonder and search around us for these elements.
There are also findings that are the result of mere chance, but as Virgil wrote in The Aeneid: "audentes fortuna iuvat (fortune smiles on the bold).
Great changes and discoveries can happen while we are lying on the sofa, as long as we are able to fly curious in other skies, with our wonderful minds without limits. We can be bold and daring without leaving the four walls of our home.
The mentally lazy, no matter how hard they try, will not come up with new ideas or good opportunities. Neither will the mental parasite or the unproductive smarty-pants. It does not depend on power, money or position on a so-called social ladder: the mentally arid do not bear fruit, at most they repeat hackneyed ideas, spew out slogans without the slightest hint of criticism or their own lucubration..
This lysergic incipit should not presage an ode to Hunter S. Thompson's crazed chemical trips, but something much more everyday, earthy, almost bourgeois, I would say.
The long weeks we have spent locked up in our homes, the nights and days the same as one another without any continuity, have been a fantastic opportunity to explore ourselves and to think, reflect, observe and, therefore, to doubt.
Thus, we have become aware of some aspects that would merit an amendment in their entirety or, at least, a renewed direction.
If we talk about the ecosystem in which we operate as citizens, it is good and necessary to share the doubts and conclusions we have reached.
Immersed in the swampy beginning of post-COVID-19, still knocked out by the gale force winds of the pandemic, we realise that the backpack we carry as citizens is too heavy to cross the quicksand that awaits us.
Faced with the onslaught of health emergencies, the welfare state has faltered and continues to falter, but at least we have understood that a country must ensure certain essential services in an impeccable manner.
Going a little further down into detail, we have understood that our taxes, the fruit of our labour, must pay for a proper health system, as well as a valid public education system of a good standard and, of course, public safety.
There is no room for selfishness in this regard. We will always be proud to contribute to it.
However, sensu contrario, superfluous structures and functions that consume resources without playing an essential role are becoming evident. or, at the very least, relevant to citizens.
A few years ago in Italy, under the government headed by Matteo Renzi, the brilliant (and ruthless) economist Carlo Cottarelli led the commission for the spending reviewThe government mandated a group of non-partisan experts to identify pockets of wasteful public spending.
It was probably the most interesting concrete policy initiative of the last decade.
Just when they were about to take the consequent cutbacks, the Renzi government collapsed and all the work done was parked in the attics of some ministry and relegated to an anecdote.
In the face of the looming economic crisis, the idea of carrying out in Spain, and where necessary, the revision of everything superfluous, is once again powerful.The EU's public spending, unproductive public spending, and dysfunctional or even sterile administrative flourishes.
No amount of tax increases can withstand the huge float of hypertrophic and unweighted public spending.
The reflection should reach the central and regional chambers, so that they begin to doubt the usefulness of verbosity, of legislative incontinence that complicates, instead of simplifying, the lives of citizens both in their private environment and in their business activities. Savings are also possible in the regulatory sense.
Less will be more, in many areas, in this new normality that awaits us with open jaws.
Marco Bolognini
Lawyer. Founder of Maio Legal and partner responsible for the areas of Corporate/M&A y banking. President of Globalaw Ltd. (2017-2019), president of the Globalaw Foundation and chair of the Globalaw CSR Committee. Columnist for the newspaper Expansion. He also writes in his blog Minimal Immorality.