We live in a time when words seem to have lost their force. Or perhaps, worse still, we live in a time when certain words are made unspeakable. Words like colonialism. Imperialism. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Domination.

And yet, if we can no longer name what is happening, then we can no longer understand it. And if we cannot understand it, we cannot change it, transform it. This is why we must free speech. Because without speech that is free, clear, and courageous, the collective conscience falls asleep. And when conscience falls asleep, the world can plunge into the abyss while continuing to call its own fall “normality.”

Last year, in my opening address at the Social Business Conference 2025, I expressed a deep concern: humanity seemed to be moving once again toward rearmament, toward militarization, toward the logic of war, instead of toward cooperation, solidarity, and the building of peace.

Today, that concern is even more urgent. Because cooperation has now become a true condition of survival. We need cooperation to confront the profound ecological crisis that threatens the very foundations of life on this planet. We need cooperation to respond to humanitarian crises, to the inequalities and injustices produced by a system we no longer call into question, a system we now regard as natural.

We also need cooperation to confront new threats, threats we still struggle even to conceptualize. One of these is the explosive arrival, on our planet, of a new form of intelligence: artificial semantic intelligence. Entities capable of understanding and producing meaning, and of making decisions in our place. Entities that no longer merely calculate, but are beginning to intervene in the very space where human beings think, decide, believe, and desire. And once again, we delude ourselves into thinking that we will be able to control them.

It is a story we have believed before, when we thought we could control the destructive forces we had unleashed, especially the force of nuclear annihilation. Today, we risk repeating the same mistake, but at an even deeper level: not only in matter, not only in energy, but even in language, in the very substance of meaning, which governs collective cognitive and decision-making processes.

And while all this is happening, the world continues to burn. The situation, compared with the previous year, has worsened. New wars have been desired, planned at the table, and supported by colonial and imperial powers: for territory, for resources, for domination, for the simple impulse to generate chaos, under the cover of religious and prophetic visions.

International law now risks becoming the fossil of another era: invoked when convenient, ignored when inconvenient, buried when it stands in the way of power. And those who claimed to represent civilization, democracy, and human rights — our dear West — increasingly resemble the monsters they say they are fighting. Enemies who, in many cases, were invented precisely to justify inhuman and destructive decisions.

Faced with all this, the question becomes inevitable. Is there perhaps something deeply wrong with human nature? Are we condemned to self-destruction? Some of my most disillusioned friends sometimes try to convince me that the disappearance of humanity would not necessarily be a tragedy. They tell me we are not a sustainable species. That we have too much power and too little wisdom. And at times, I must admit, their arguments seem strong. Because it is true: on a planetary scale, we behave like entities devoid of intelligence and endowed with excessive power. Entities completely lacking foresight and self-regulation.

Perhaps this is also happening because the world has become too complex for our poor primate brains.

But however strong these arguments may seem, they collapse in the face of another fact. Human beings are also capable of coming together. Of cooperating. Of caring. Of healing. Of repairing. Of building. Of rejecting the logic of domination and destruction. There are historical moments, communities, and projects in which human beings manifest qualities that remind us that within us there is a light. A fragile light, but a real one.

This light must not be idealized. It must not be turned into a comforting fairy tale. It does not erase the horror of which we are capable. It does not erase the victims and the suffering. It does not erase the responsibility of those who today commit crimes with impunity and treat human life as a bargaining chip in a struggle for power.

But that light exists.

And if we stop believing in it, if we stop nourishing it, if we stop creating the conditions for it to manifest, then yes, we will already have handed the future over to despair.

This is why it is time to stop being afraid of certain words.

Even the word “revolution.”

For too long, this word has been associated only with violence, chaos, and destruction. But there are revolutions that are not born from a desire for retaliation or revenge. There are revolutions of conscience, of the economy, of politics, of education, of technology, of care. Revolutions that do not seek to replace one form of domination with another, but to change the very conditions that make domination possible in the first place.

Today, we need revolutions.

Because it is clear that our societies are not simply failing to solve poverty, inequality, conflicts, and wars. They are literally producing them, manufacturing them, organizing them.

They have made them structural.

We need to imagine and implement new sociopolitical contexts capable of awakening qualities that too often remain latent in human beings: qualities buried beneath the many lies we are taught about what is possible and what is impossible, about what we deserve and what we do not deserve, about what can be changed and what we should instead accept as inevitable.

But many things we call inevitable are only the result of rules built by human beings. And what has been built can be deconstructed and transformed.

A social business, for example — that is, a social enterprise that becomes financially self-sufficient in order to solve a real social or environmental problem, rather than maximize profit — is a small revolution inside an obsolete and dying system. A system whose ruling classes are still trying to preserve themselves, without recognizing that their time is coming to an end.

But the problem does not lie only with the people in power, with the many narcissists and psychopaths who govern us. The problem lies in the very architecture of the systems in which we live. In their rules. Rules that encode corruption, produce inequality, normalize the extraction of value from people and nature, and reward domination.

These rules do not merely allow injustice. They require it. They do not merely tolerate destruction. They organize it.

This is why creating a social business is not simply an economic act. It is an act of resistance. It is a revolutionary act.

Because it demonstrates, concretely, that another logic is possible. That human enterprise does not necessarily have to be organized around greed. That intelligence does not necessarily have to serve domination. That profit does not have to be the ultimate measure of value. That the economy can become an instrument of liberation, instead of a machine of submission.

But a dying system is a rather dangerous creature. A falling giant can destroy a great deal around it. When an oversized, exhausted system collapses, the damage it produces can be immense. Perhaps even existential. This is why we cannot limit ourselves to criticizing the old world. And we cannot passively wait for it to collapse.

We must build alternatives, and we must do so now. While there is still time. While there is still life to protect. While there is still a future to defend.

And we must face the crises of our time without giving in to anger, resentment, fear, or despair. We must not avoid confronting reality. That would only produce paralysis.

The crisis we are living through, in this age of great change, can become despair. Or responsibility. It can become resignation. Or courage. It can become closure. Or creation.

Today, we all need to become a little more revolutionary, in the deepest sense of the word: builders of a new world, capable of emerging from the ashes of our mistakes. A world of collaboration, not competition. A world of peace, not war. A world of beauty, not suffering.

This world will not be born on its own. It will not be born because the old system suddenly recognizes its crimes and steps aside. It will be born only through concrete gestures and projects, concrete communities, concrete enterprises capable of embodying a different logic.

This is why even a conference can be more than a conference.

The Social Business Conference 2026, together with other similar initiatives, can be understood as one of these small revolutionary acts: a space where people, ideas, experiences, and visions come together to say that the world does not necessarily have to continue in the direction it is going. A space where new possibilities are imagined and begin to be transformed into concrete action.

So let us continue to cultivate our vision. Let us continue to free speech. Let us continue to denounce what must be denounced. And above all, let us continue to act accordingly.

See you on Thursday, May 21, in Barbengo, at the Social Business Conference 2026.