Without Humanity: when God, nation and family stop protecting us

If the Italian right invokes “God, nation and family,” we should ask: which God, which nation, which family is it talking about?The answer seems immediate: ours, the Italian one. But if a significant portion of families now lives in economic precarity, if work no longer guarantees security, if trust in institutions erodes and social cohesion weakens, then what remains of that promise? And above all: which God is supposed to save us?

Those paying closer attention may recall that Giuseppe Mazzini spoke of “God, Humanity, the Nation and the Family.” It is telling that, in political language, the very concept of Humanity has disappeared. And yet, that is precisely where the formula breaks: without Humanity, God becomes ideology, the nation becomes a border, the family becomes a norm. No longer horizons of meaning, but instruments of exclusion.

Perhaps this is where our present begins.

In a world where indifference speaks, where blindness prevails and bodies seem emptied of soul, we should pause and open our eyes. In a world dominated by conflicts from West to East, what future awaits us?

The news flows by in sterile succession, reporting with detachment yet another American escalation in Venezuela and the consolidation of control over Caracas. The endless tragedy in Palestine has slipped into the margins, no longer making noise. The veil of silence has never truly been torn from the collapse of Sudan, nor from the systematic practices of surveillance and repression targeting Muslim minorities in parts of Asia.

Today, however, screens are saturated with the flashes of explosions over Tehran: the joint offensive by the United States and Israel against Iran—through targeted bombings and attacks on strategic infrastructure—is framed as a necessity, while the world holds its breath as the Strait of Hormuz becomes a corridor of military tension and threatened energy routes. In the opening headlines of major European broadcasts, this new front occupies every space, reshaping in a matter of hours the hierarchy of global urgencies.

Meanwhile, at the gates of an increasingly fortified Europe, the Russia–Ukraine conflict no longer knocks: it has become the white noise of a new, icy normality.

How can we take as reference leaders who are blinded solely by power? How can we trust those who read the world only through geopolitical, economic and strategic interests, while entire populations are reduced to collateral damage?

One answer may lie in anesthesia: we carry on with our lives, we do what we want to do, we look ahead as individuals. It is the simplest form of emotional survival—do not feel, do not look, do not get involved.

But if we truly had even a minimal sense of shared love, these situations would make us angry, would make us feel powerless. In a world that offers us the opportunity of life, we spend it annihilating one another with our own hands.

Once, this was done to conquer unexplored lands. But now? Today we conquer resources, influence, technological hegemony, control over information. Violence no longer always takes the form of declared war: sometimes it is a diplomatic decision, an embargo, an arms market, a strategic silence.

There are men and women who play at being God, and we are like worshippers without a temple, kneeling before deities that do not listen, do not see, do not respond.

Paper deities, made of decrees, treaties, press releases and political narratives. Deities that do not bleed, do not weep, do not bury their children, yet decide who may live in peace and who must live in fear. Deities of power and money, preaching peace while preparing war, promising prosperity while administering inequality, speaking of respect while exercising domination.

And precisely because they are made of paper, they can be torn apart, rewritten, changed—but as long as we continue to believe in them, they continue to govern us.

We are subjected to these secular deities, betrayed by them, because they have promised us a world of peace, prosperity and respect, while not even the last elected figure seems to show the slightest regard for the people they claim to represent. Governments, alliances, economic elites: all claim to see the global picture, yet few seem to remember that behind every number there is a face, a family, a denied future.

And perhaps this is the point: it is not only the world that is at war.

It is our very idea of Humanity.