We were on a family trip when we first used a car with GPS. It seemed natural to us daughters that a woman’s voice gave precise instructions on how to get to the destination: turn left, take the next exit, recalculation. But mom was not satisfied and answered aloud: “You, miss, are very rude, you don’t say hello, you don’t say please.” We laughed quietly and after getting lost a few times, we admitted that the lady was a machine.

I began with an anecdote to illustrate the fluid and non-linear times that require us to reorganize, redefine, reconfigure or recalculate plans, schedules, activities, meetings, travel, texts, clothes, which is exhausting. Technology, information, goods, money or politics flow without stopping; Between 2021 and 2025, we will elect three presidents.

Referee career

E. Lorenzo’s research on the “butterfly effect” in the 1960s showed that minimal variations in initial conditions can generate significant effects in complex systems; the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas. We see it every day: failed forecasts about the weather, candidates, football or economic growth.

Since society is a complex and chaotic system, 2023 has recorded a series of unexpected events: unstoppable crime, death on the cross, the murder of Fernando Villavicenci, presidential elections, the energy crisis, the case of Metastasis and others, which will lead to facts we do not know and to confirm again uncertainty as a key indicator. We adapt to changing lifestyles in constant tension. To a new order from a mess and vice versa. We are hostages of the “fatigue society” (Byung-Chul Han).

Extortion exacerbates insecurity

The international panorama is the same. The paradox between progress and insecurity is latent when 6 out of 7 people around the world feel insecure (UN, 2022), and the interaction of current challenges presents an unprecedented complex of uncertainties.

For the thinker Edgar Morin, antagonism spreads, without reactions to combat it, exacerbating the political crisis, consciousness, thought and civilization. It invites us to civilize the Earth, reform thinking and transform a species whose fate is in danger, betting on the unbelievable; enabling human creativity to reorganize the planet; preventing the survival of systems that turn individuals into machines.

Morin proposes that if a system cannot solve its vital problems, it disintegrates and metamorphoses into a richer metasystem, capable of solving its own problems. Like a caterpillar that, wrapping itself in a cocoon, begins its self-destruction to form the organism of a butterfly, equal to but different from the caterpillar.

But as Bauman says: “in the complex system called history, human behavior is by far the most variable of variables; and the least predictable of unpredictable things.” The only way to intervene in the future is to unite, causing the events that mark it. May they bring us together to preserve the memory of what was our island of peace, which is running away from us, emptied of innocence. (OR)