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Am I a believer, atheist or physicalist?

Philosophy, Physicalism, Religion, Science No Responses »

Feb 012013

Firstly, we must ask ourselves, ignoring for a moment the question of believer or atheist, what is physicalism and what does it mean to be a physicalist. It actually means many things, and in my case, at least four.

The first instance, and the one which revolutionised my existence, I owe to my Uncle Carlo. It was a winterís evening. It was cold outside, gusts of wind could be heard and rain mixed with hail was rattling on the roof. Uncle Carlo and I were sitting silently in the warm near the hearth. Suddenly, my uncle confronted me with the question:

Do you know that you’re actually richer than me?

That’s not true, Uncle, I answered immediately, as if I had been expecting this question all my life, you’re richer than I am. And that was the truth.

I’m not talking about material things, money, houses, land, animals, he replied dolefully, and yet with a force which sounded almost like disgust, I mean wealth in terms of age, youth, of life. You’re still a boy, I’m getting on, you’ve still got many years ahead of you, but I’ve only got a few left, do you understand?

The nightmare

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Apr 162012

Everyone has his borderline experiences. I had had one of these in Paris a few years before I started working as a tourist guide for Paris Vision. My existential angst, which I had long been keeping under control by sheer will power, suddenly exploded. Then a nauseating, gloomy, intolerable vision of life took hold of me, possessed me. There was no escape from it. I hated everything, death above all. Just the idea of it terrified me, made me feel powerless, rebellious, neurotic. I felt trapped, couldn’t free my mind and my gut of these destructive, negative feelings. I even despised the world that man had constructed, a world that I knew something of by then, having had personal experience of it. I knew what it meant to work, to struggle to survive. I tried to find an acceptable comparison between living with human animals and living with animal animals, such as goats, and I couldn’t find one. Goat society seemed to me to be a million times better than human society. Goats don’t kill each other, they live pacifically together. I had become convinced that any other animal on earth, however brutal, could not possibly have created such a false, bestial society.

The dream

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Apr 132012

At the beginning of the Seventies, I began to give French and Italian lessons to small groups of students in private schools – International School of Languages, Holmes Language School, Berlitz Language school in Melbourne. I would have liked to have had a deeper, more academic knowledge of these languages but what I did have was, in any case, more than adequate for my courses.

A few years later, with some financial help from a friend, and sticking to my principle, if other people can be successful why shouldn’t I be ?, I opened a language school: European School of Languages, in the centre of the town where I was living. I would never have expected it to be such an amazing success; it was incredible. In the space of a few years about twenty-five part-time mother-tongue teachers were teaching at the European School of Languages and all the classrooms were constantly in use. Fantastic!

The leap

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Mar 132012

When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.

In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.

My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.

In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.

Has Life Meaning at a glance

The Manifesto No Responses »

Jan 302012

How many of our ancestors through the centuries, have asked this question? Surely not many. Until recently, one lived the life they lived, good or bad, one just just lived. Today views have changed. The values of the past – the belief of design, in destiny, in the homeland, the monarchy, rulers, the family, ideologies - are all beliefs that are no longer certain and can no longer be a basis on which to place our lives.

How can we, however, now, answer this hellish question of ‘has life meaning’? Because it is hell to make sense of, to find some attributes to justify our presence on this earth, we invent worlds, and of these fabrications none ever managed to fully meet our doubts and our need for knowledge and certainty. Furthermore we have and continue to butcher each other in the name of answering this question from hell.

Sense and nonsense, have a long history, a story that comes from afar, it is this story and this distance that we now want to talk about.

The predator State at a glance

The Manifesto No Responses »

Jan 302012

In the past, the Church and the State vied for power, mostly using the sword: sometimes “he” ruled, others “she” ruled, or at times they ruled together. Today, however, both the Church and the State, are reduced to the role of guard dogs of capitalism: the Church deceived the “flock” with false hope and empty promises of afterlife, while the State abusing the rule of “the people” with every means of psychological coercion. They do little more than protect the hierarchal state and criminality in which we live. Politically speaking, things are like this: As long as the people are in need of leaders, then the people will forever remain as people, and leaders will remain as leaders. Only when people begin leading themselves, will things begin to change.

This reasoning goes like that: the “people”, the “working people”, have never needed leaders; the leaders, on the other hand, have always needed the people to give them the power they seek. In essence, why would “working people” be in need of leaders, that is “social parasites”, that humiliate, exploit, and rob them of their lives?

Then quite clearly: as long as these institutions, the Church and the State and moreover Capitalism exist, mankind will never find peace. And furthermore is doomed, for the real and ultimate danger of Capitalism, church and state, is the destruction of everything that grows and breathes on this planet, including themselves.

The Manifesto of Horace Guglielmini

The Manifesto No Responses »

Jan 232012

The manifesto of Orazio Guglielmini can easily be deduced from Guglielmini’s “Testament”, thus very briefly: As long as there exists even one politician or one priest on earth, mankind will not find peace.

The political-existential testament of Guglielmini is sealed in four books:

“The Divine Indifference”

“The Predator State”

“Has Life Meaning?”

“The Wonderland”

The first book presents the work of religion, the second examines the state system, the third seeks to determine whether or not life has meaning and in the fourth and final book, “The Wonderland”, Guglielmini analyzes his native land from its origin up to today, just as a therapist does with his patient.