The value of a man

Here we are a usual comment in a working relationship: "this man is most valuable" or "this person is priceless". So, how do we weight the value of a man?
Well: that is a "straight comment". So, as for every single simple truth there is a "transversal" one, what would be the transversal truth in this case?
One answer can be found in Antonio Machado's Juan de Mairena: "Nadie es más que nadie, porque, por mucho que valga un hombre, nunca tendrá valor más alto que el valor de ser hombre".
Which could be freely translated as "Nobody is more (greater or better) than anybody else, because, whatever the valuable a man could be, he never could reach a higher value than the one of being a man. Don't you agree?
Transversal truths brings to our attention the contradictions of the system and society we live in.

Thinking about Modernity

THERE is a mode of vital experience -experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils- that is shared by men and women all over the world today. This body of experience is the so-called "modernity."

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world, and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air."

People who find themselves in the midst of this maelstrom are apt to feel that they are the first ones, and maybe the only ones, to be going through it; this feeling has engendered numerous nostalgic myths of pre-modern Paradise Lost. In fact, however, great and ever-increasing numbers of people have been going through it for close to five hundred years. Although most of these people have probably experienced modernity as a radical threat to all their history and traditions, it has, in the course of five centuries, developed a rich history and a plenitude of traditions of its own. I want to explore and chart these traditions, to understand the ways in which they can nourish and enrich our own modernity, and the ways in which they may obscure or impoverish our sense of what modernity is and what it can be.

The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place within it; the industrialisation of production which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whose tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them halfway across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass-communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful nation states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along an ever-expanding drastically fluctuating capitalist world market. In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have become known as "modernization".

(Marshall Berman, All that is solid, melts into the air").