Editorial - The daily antidote to war
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/25/2025
A few days ago, a friend of mine had difficulty paying a fine online. She turned to a traffic warden who listened to her and solved the problem. Thanking her, my friend said, “How wonderful it would be if everyone worked like you!” and the traffic warden was moved. That emotion of a worker touched me and spoke volumes.
Every day, we are immersed in an ocean of reciprocity, and we don't even notice it. A dense network of civic love between strangers who prepare our breakfast, treat us in hospitals, educate our children at school, produce the things we use, clean our streets, and care for our elderly. This is also a face of the market. In fact, the market is above all this immense network of cooperation, the largest and most extensive ever created in human history. And the cement that holds this admirable ethical edifice together is work, humble and everyday work: we meet, we serve each other, we talk to each other simply by working. When we see what happens every day in the work of nurses, doctors, teachers, bricklayers, tram drivers, street cleaners, and waiters, we are led to doubt whether fraternity is really the “forgotten principle” of the French Revolution, or whether, instead, it is not what we have collectively developed most: it is certainly neither equality nor freedom that keeps hospitals and schools running every morning. Without schools and public healthcare, effective freedom and equality would be too small, but what leads us to cooperate every second in a classroom or an emergency room is more easily described by the word fraternity; because fraternity is a bond, it is a relationship, it is neither a right nor an individual status—it is the good that lies in between, it is the “between.” And if one day computers and AI do the jobs we do today, we will soon have to reinvent another equally serious language to talk to each other and not fall into a nightmare where everyone meets only themselves.
But then there is something else to say. The good form of cooperation coexists with bad forms of cooperation. Because while most women and men cooperate to bring other men and women to life, there are others, still a small minority, who cooperate to kill, morally and physically, other women, men, and children. These are cooperations for gambling, pornography, and prostitution, those of the many mafias: other networks, large and increasingly global, where cooperation takes a different form.
The Book of Genesis first tells us about the construction of Noah's ark (chapter 6), and then (chapter 11) about the construction of the Tower of Babel. Both the builders of the ark and those of the tower-fortress were workers, and they were in solidarity with each other, because without a form of working solidarity, no work can begin.
Even in the construction of the Tower of Babel, collective action, a working community, is explicit. The comparison between Noah's ark and the Tower of Babel tells us that not all solidarity and cooperation are good, and not all work is good: the work of the builders and engineers of Babel was not blessed work, and it was scattered by God. Because there are human works that are good to be scattered. They are always the works of men and women, sometimes, often of individually good men and women. The condemnation of Babel is not directed at the individual worker; it is an ethical condemnation of those structures of sin, even when they are the fruit of work and cooperation.
Work in evil deeds coexists every day with work in good deeds. In recent years, we have been gaining a new, dramatic awareness of the greatest evil cooperation of which men are capable: war.
War is also collective action, it is cooperation, work, it is extremely complex cooperation. No battle can be won without perfect cooperation, from the weapons factories to the battlefields. But if we look at it for a moment, we realize that cooperation for war is the opposite of that in our everyday markets. It is the cooperation of one group against the cooperation of another group. It is a zero-sum game (+1, -1) or a negative-sum game (-1, 2), where the victory of one side corresponds to the defeat of the other.
This is the opposite of what happens in the civilian market, where the pizza maker who prepares my focaccia and I who eat it enjoy the same joy, which translates into a final greeting: “thank you,” “thank you,” a reciprocity of the same meaning and sign (+1, +1).
As ordinary citizens, we can do too little in the face of the absurdity of these new winds of war. We are left with a constant moral tinnitus, which reduces our good happiness, and it is good that it reduces it—our full happiness would be totally out of tune today, amid all this pain in the world. Every morning, billions of people say no to war by saying yes to their work, to market cooperation, to the good chain of civil reciprocity. We can experience our work as an antidote to war, looking into the eyes of the people who work with us and for us, and perhaps starting to thank them more often: in their emotion, we can hope.
