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Rebirth requires learning/8 - The four tendencies that members of a religious community or movement can have after the death of the founder.
by Luigino Bruni
Article published in the 4/2024 issue of Città Nuova on 07/09/2024 
When a community or spiritual movement passes from the first generation of founders to the next, this decisive passage takes various forms in the people who are part of it. In general, there are (at least) four main tendencies that are present in different degrees in people, and sometimes even in the same person.
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The first tendency is the one found mainly in those we can call the diehards. It is the tendency that leads the person to live after the death of the founders exactly as they lived before, as if nothing important had happened. The same lifestyle, the same spiritual readings, the same commitments, the same language. This continuity has positive dimensions, too (seriousness, for example), mixed with some other, more problematic ones. They see the external impact of what they do diminishing, they feel a growing physical and spiritual fatigue, but they go on like they did yesterday. They are like that friend of mine who, faced with the increase in the price of petrol, said: ‘Nothing changes for me: I always put in 20 euros worth of it’. Usually, when this tendency prevails, it brings with it a certain nostalgia for the past, the praise of times gone by, the idea that all the troubles of the present depend on having lost the purity of the early days. It is a very understandable tendency, but one that should not be encouraged.
The second tendency is what we might call delusion. It is typical in those who at some point have convinced themselves that the foundation phase was a long self-deception, a collective and individual delusion played out in perfect good faith by all, which kept them in a spiritual and psychological type of adolescence or childhood for too long. Some people who find themselves in this second tendency also develop feelings of anger and rebellion, especially if they have invested heavily in the first season of community. The anger is towards themselves and sometimes also towards the community. It is a delusion that, however, is preferred to illusion and can thus become a true spiritual rebirth into a new maturity.
Then there is the third tendency towards spiritual depression, a kind of individual and collective sloth, made up of a lack of desire and eros. This is the most dangerous tendency, and its symptoms (cosmic pessimism, cynicism, criticism of anyone who does anything constructive...) must be identified immediately. Those who cultivate this tendency do not experience delusion beyond the illusion, also because they have neither the energy nor the will to do much self-analysis. They simply experience a gradual decline in the joy of doing things as before, they believe less and less in what they do, and no longer announce anything to anyone. They attribute the decline in desire to advancing age, to times that have changed, to young people not being what they once were. When this trend takes hold in communities, people withdraw to private life, and find themselves in a similar condition to that of the two disciples of Emmaus before the ‘unknown traveller’ joined them.
Finally, there is also a fourth, good trend, which is different and very important. It is hope. This is triggered in those who, faced with the same difficulties that everyone else sees, and well aware that in the community some dimensions have really changed and life is harder, instead of cultivating the three previous tendencies (which they see well in themselves and around them) try to engage in new projects, to use their creativity in search of new narrative codes, and together with others give life to collective processes of change. They do this in the simplicity of everyday life: they do not wait for the big moment, but make the small moments they have big. Hope, this hope, has nothing to do with a new self-delusion or naivety. It is born when one day, after perhaps having experienced all three tendencies, one realises that rebirth requires learning, that one can choose to be born again, that a resurrection is possible at 30, 60, 90 years of age. It may not be the great resurrection of everyone and the whole movement, but it can be your resurrection and that of the people you live with. And then you set off, with a few friends, for a new promised land. People who choose to cultivate this tendency are recognisable by a particular kind of meekness and typical delicate beauty. They attract us and, even if we have already been dominated by the other three tendencies, we feel involved in their rebirth. It is in the hearts of these people of hope that the future is sprouting: the third traveller has already joined them on the road to Emmaus.
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Rebirth requires learning/8 - The four tendencies that members of a religious community or movement can have after the death of the founder.
by Luigino Bruni
Article published in the 4/2024 issue of Città Nuova on 07/09/2024 
When a community or spiritual movement passes from the first generation of founders to the next, this decisive passage takes various forms in the people who are part of it. In general, there are (at least) four main tendencies that are present in different degrees in people, and sometimes even in the same person.
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    [title] => Prophecy lives only in the present
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Rebirth requires learning/6 - Communities and movements, between the words of the founders and the voice of the new prophets
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 11/07/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, no. 2/2024
In spiritual communities and charismatic movements (i.e. arising from a charisma, whether religious or secular), the form taken up by the exercise of one's history, of memory and remembering is important. The most precious and difficult discernment does not concern negative episodes or small words from the past: the crucial art is knowing how to use the true words, the founding episodes of a community's history, including the great words of the founders and the first beloved and venerated witnesses.

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In this essential exercise, too, a passage from the Gospel of Luke comes to our aid: «Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them. ...they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.» (Lk 11:47-48). Jesus’ contemporaries had begun to celebrate and honour the prophets of the past, those who had founded the faith of the people, rediscovering and building up their tombs, which were transformed into authentic shrines and became destinations of popular pilgrimages. For some, this new prophetic devotion could be interpreted as a sign of a new season of appreciation and listening to the word of the prophets, a true conversion: «They killed them; you build».
And instead, here too, Jesus surprises us and unmasks a reality that shows itself opposite to what it appears like - the Gospel is a succession of unveiled realities that show themselves opposite to those that seem obvious to all. And he tells us that celebrating the prophets of the past by honouring their tombs and their memory may contain nothing new: the prophets of the present (including himself and the Baptist) continued to be persecuted and killed while the people were worshipping the tombs of yesterday's prophets.
Honouring the prophets (saints or founders) of yesterday is therefore not a credible sign of a community listening to and esteeming its prophets of today, too. On the contrary, the history of Christian, spiritual and ideal-driven communities often shows exactly the opposite tendency: the more the saints of the past are venerated, the less the prophets of the present are listened to, who, not infrequently, are discredited and persecuted precisely in the name of devotion to the great ones of the past.
Charismatic communities have a continual vital need for prophecy, which is certainly expressed in keeping the founder's charisma alive and present in its entirety, but it is also expressed in recognising, encouraging and not fighting the prophecy present in those people that the Spirit continually sends to the communities, especially in the generations following that of the first founders.
A charismatic community does not live today simply by remembering yesterday's prophecy, nor only by updating yesterday's charisma for today. All of this is necessary, but it is not sufficient for a community that wants to keep itself alive and life-giving and thus to continue to attract new vocations and young people. The sufficient condition is listening to present prophecy, which presupposes that the people of today who by gift and task incorporate a prophetic dimension are neither rejected nor discouraged, but welcomed and valued.
A charisma is not a diamond that made an appearance on earth once and for all and must only be kept in a glass case so that it can continue to shine. A charisma is a seed that continues to give its flowers and fruit in every season - charismas always require a declination in the present time. Jesus has remained alive in the Church not only because he is treasured and venerated, not only because of his real presence in the community, but because the Spirit has sent many charismas to the Church over the centuries.
But recognising today's prophets is not at all easy, because the real prophets are generally neither recognised nor heard. Instead, communities love false prophets because, as ‘prophets by profession’ they specialise in telling the leaders and the average sensibility of the community only what they like to hear in order to reinforce illusions and self-deceptions (that are very common in times of crisis).
The passage from Luke tells us something more, too: that today's prophets are silenced and marginalised just as the celebration of yesterday's prophets grows. A concrete way of doing this is to use the words of the founders or great men and women of the past to silence the true prophetic words of today, thinking, often in good faith, that the new prophecy that is expressed in today's community competes with, diminishes or even fights the prophecy of yesterday's founders. And so texts, oral testimonies, and yesterday's moral lessons are used to counter today's words and moral lessons that would be, instead, the only real cure for the crisis that the community is experiencing.
Photo credits: Fauxels’ images from Pexels
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Rebirth requires learning/6 - Communities and movements, between the words of the founders and the voice of the new prophets
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 11/07/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, no. 2/2024
In spiritual communities and charismatic movements (i.e. arising from a charisma, whether religious or secular), the form taken up by the exercise of one's history, of memory and remembering is important. The most precious and difficult discernment does not concern negative episodes or small words from the past: the crucial art is knowing how to use the true words, the founding episodes of a community's history, including the great words of the founders and the first beloved and venerated witnesses.

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Rebirth requires learning/4 - How to keep charismatic communities alive and fresh in the generation following that of the founders
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 30/04/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 12/2023
Communities live within a dynamic tension between the “inside” and the “outside”. Without a certain collective intimacy made up of dense, strong and warm relationships, you cannot create any community. Therefore, the centripetal force that pulls everyone towards a single spirit is essential to generate true community life. These strong, intimate relationships are cherished by community members. They generate a typical and great joy: as we say ‘we’, we hear our truest name resounding, and as we say ‘I’, everything speaks to us of ‘we’, to the point of (almost) no longer being able to distinguish the individual soul from the collective spirit.
This typical relational good is the first nourishment of communities. It is in this intimacy, completely individual and completely collective, that the secret, the beauty, as well as the criticality of community life are found, especially when communities attract and cultivate vocations, that is, when they are composed of people called by name by the charisma of the community, which they feel are the best and truest part of their own selves. The subject's identification with the group becomes a spiritual game of mirrors, a mutual and generalised empathy, and individuals generally perceive no compulsion to feel the same feelings as everyone else – that’s the ‘il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare’ (‘shipwrecking is sweet to me in this sea,’ quoting Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi - the tr.) of the community.
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Inevitably, this internal dynamic creates boundaries, borders and demarcation zones between inside and outside, in order to guard this precious intimacy. The intense internal life then, over the years, also creates a common language, a way of life, a way of praying and celebrating, winks and gestures that make it immediately recognisable from the outside who is part of that particular group. Those who are inside do not realise that they are changing day by day, but to those who are outside it appears very clear and is also viewed with some concern. For if, after the first phase, communities do not lower their drawbridges and make entry (and exit) much more porous and easy, they begin to decay through loss of biodiversity and air.
In this regard, an episode from the Gospel of Luke may be interesting: ‘»Master,« said John, »we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.« »Do not stop him,« Jesus said, »for whoever is not against you is for you.« (Lk 9:49-50). Jesus' companions behave like many members of a community towards people outside the “magic circle” who act as if they were inside. There are many ways in which these dynamics are expressed.
One of these is regarding those people who, after spending time with the community, feel a second vocation, leave it and start their own new community. Especially at the beginning, these people of a “second vocation” use very similar, if not identical, language and spiritual categories to those they learnt and lived in their original, first community. This similarity sometimes appears excessive to the old companions, they think it is disturbing, similar to plagiarism, and they complain about the lack of recognition of the first source, and so their reaction can turn into outright hostility. This is a common and understandable mistake, but one that must be fought as a temptation.
Another typical phenomenon is the arrival in the community of people with their own talents and charismas that are in part different from those of the founder, who nevertheless feel themselves to be authentic children of that charisma. This is the experience of St Paul who, although he did not know the Lord, felt himself to be an apostle just like the twelve. And just as Paul did not have an easy life with Peter, James and the other apostles, so the new Pauls do not have an easy life in charismatic communities, where they are often opposed by members, who are forgetting, perhaps in good faith, that salvation and a good future depend greatly on the presence of these external-internal reformers.
In the generation following that of the founders, the spiritual “border management” of the community becomes fundamental and vital. Everything must be done to ensure that yesterday's community is enlivened and challenged by new arrivals, who are sometimes very different from the first generation members’ profile, but who work the same miracles “in the name” of the charisma. Among those who work in the same name there will undoubtedly be false prophets and even opportunists, which is an inevitable risk because a community that did not also generate false prophets would not have enough life force to generate any true prophets.
When, on the other hand, the fear of losing the identity and the purity of the charisma prevails (a typical “Gnostic” temptation), communities wither, grow old, and the joy of living disappears from them, which, together with the presence of young people are the two “sacraments” of communities capable of a future.
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    [text] => 
Rebirth requires learning/4 - How to keep charismatic communities alive and fresh in the generation following that of the founders
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 30/04/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 12/2023
Communities live within a dynamic tension between the “inside” and the “outside”. Without a certain collective intimacy made up of dense, strong and warm relationships, you cannot create any community. Therefore, the centripetal force that pulls everyone towards a single spirit is essential to generate true community life. These strong, intimate relationships are cherished by community members. They generate a typical and great joy: as we say ‘we’, we hear our truest name resounding, and as we say ‘I’, everything speaks to us of ‘we’, to the point of (almost) no longer being able to distinguish the individual soul from the collective spirit.
This typical relational good is the first nourishment of communities. It is in this intimacy, completely individual and completely collective, that the secret, the beauty, as well as the criticality of community life are found, especially when communities attract and cultivate vocations, that is, when they are composed of people called by name by the charisma of the community, which they feel are the best and truest part of their own selves. The subject's identification with the group becomes a spiritual game of mirrors, a mutual and generalised empathy, and individuals generally perceive no compulsion to feel the same feelings as everyone else – that’s the ‘il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare’ (‘shipwrecking is sweet to me in this sea,’ quoting Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi - the tr.) of the community.
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Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023
We recently commemorated sixty years since Martin Luther King's great prophetic speech, I Have a Dream, delivered in Washington on 28 August 1963. Looking back on that speech, there was one passage that struck me: “This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”. He was very critical of gradualism, of the deeply ingrained idea that big changes cannot happen immediately because the great complexity of the reality to be changed requires a gradual process and a policy of small steps. Gradualism receives much consensus because it emphasises a true value, that of inclusion, of the need to involve the various players who have a role in the creation of problems and thus also in their solution. Hence the great processes of grass root consultation, questionnaires, and the many commissions to ensure the synodality of the entire process of change.
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I do not want to claim that the gradualist method should never be adopted or that it is always wrong. The question is a different one: why was Martin Luther King so opposed to gradualism? Because, quite simply, in those who invoked the politics of small steps he saw an alibi for continuing to postpone urgent and obvious reforms and changes (apartheid, for example), and because it acted as a ‘tranquilliser’ of conscience for those in power. Appealing to a value, even if it was a valid one in itself, only became a justification for the status quo - those who oppose a necessary process almost always do so in the name of some good reason.
Not all changes happen in small steps. In physics, water turns from liquid to solid in an instant. Revolutions do not happen gradually either, because certain processes explode when a critical threshold is passed. Today, for example, those who continue to advocate gradualist policy in the area of climate change and ecological transition (the very word transition incorporates the idea of small steps) almost always use this fine word to slow down a change that was ever so urgent already twenty years ago. The inclusion of all governments and various economic stakeholders is an essential part of the environmental problem; it is the prime cause of why we are watching motionlessly as the climate declines rapidly and inexorably. When the ship is sinking, or when a house is burning, no one thinks of calling together an assembly to decide what to do through complex procedures: there would have to be a captain to take responsibility for the choices and to make those choices. The world does not have a captain (and that is just as well) and in fact we are sinking; but this ‘captain’ can and must emerge from below, from the world's population, from civil processes that can lead to quick and effective decisions to replace the lack of ‘captains’ - and let's just hope they are peaceful and non-violent.
But what is astonishing is that gradualism takes hold even in ideal driven communities and movements which do have ‘captains’, where there is a government that could and should take urgent decisions. And instead, all too often, even in these, when faced with general and serious crises that would require rapid change, the gradualist method is preferred, and with it the creation of commissions that will one day report on the needs that have emerged with the (somewhat naive) hope that in the end a synthesis will be made of all the information that will have been gathered. And so the years pass, and the governments with them, the disease worsens, and while the doctors are discussing what to do, the patient is nearing death.
Furthermore, a typical error of these gradualist methods concerns economics. The economic aspects are the first to emerge during a crisis, but they are the last to be addressed, because the economy is an indicator of much broader and deeper phenomena than just the economy. Economic indicators are the red light in a car that signals an engine failure: it tells you to fix the engine and after that, once it is repaired, the light will go out on its own. Instead, they start fixing the economy first without understanding the structural illnesses that generated the economic crisis, and the more they fix the economy, the more the illness grows in the depths.
The quality of a government in times of crisis depends a lot on the ability of those in charge to sense, by instinct, where the problems are in the ‘engine’, and to start from there. They will receive criticism, accusations of authoritarianism, but perhaps they will save the body that is suffering.
Credits foto: © Unseen Histories su Unsplash
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    [text] => 
Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023
We recently commemorated sixty years since Martin Luther King's great prophetic speech, I Have a Dream, delivered in Washington on 28 August 1963. Looking back on that speech, there was one passage that struck me: “This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”. He was very critical of gradualism, of the deeply ingrained idea that big changes cannot happen immediately because the great complexity of the reality to be changed requires a gradual process and a policy of small steps. Gradualism receives much consensus because it emphasises a true value, that of inclusion, of the need to involve the various players who have a role in the creation of problems and thus also in their solution. Hence the great processes of grass root consultation, questionnaires, and the many commissions to ensure the synodality of the entire process of change.
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    [title] => The EoC Today: Challenges and Opportunities
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By now, the Economy of Communion is nearing its twentieth anniversary. A “place of resistence”.
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Citta Nuova n.21/2010 on 10/11/2010
At the end of May, 2011, everyone in the EoC will meet again in Sao Paulo to rediscover the roots of this experience and outline new prospects. The EoC is alive and growing in today’s history, through the crises and the hopes of our time. Chiara Lubich’s proposal to begin businesses and industrial parks, and then (in May of 1989) to start a cultural movement that would give “scientific dignity” to the praxis of the businesses, did not fall into an empty abyss. It was embraced by thousands of people, mostly within the Focolare Movement but recently even outside of it. They are people and institutions who are trying to make that seed produce fruit.
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At the same time, I believe that the entire EoC today is called to face a new step.
I was recently in Brazil and, together with some of the Brazilian protagonists of the project, we went back through some of the first moments of the project. It made me remember a not very well-known episode from those days, and this memory struck me in a particular way. Chiara, returning from that trip to Brazil, had noticed a detail in a painting of Mary Desolate which was in her office and which Igino Giordani had given her many years earlier. In that painting, Mary had a crown of thorns tightly pressed to her chest. For her, it was an immediate connection with the “crown of thorns of poverty” that she had seen in the favelas of Sao Paulo and which had been the inspiration of the newly born EoC. 
This episode made us reflect on the nature of the originating inspiration and on the prospects that await us now and in the years to come. The crown of thorns – the suffering of the poor that Chiara invited us to love and redeem – it was the crown of thorns of Sao Paulo, of all cities. It was the crown of thorns of the world and of capitalism. Obviously, that crown was not made only of the poor in the Focolare. For Chiara, the poor in the Movement were only a first step for then going well beyond that. 
The prospect that opened wide to the EoC was one of great scope: that of contributing to give life to a new economic-social order, to a new model of development, rethinking and connecting the two central realities of capitalism which are still opposites today: business (the motor of economic development) and poverty (of those who are excluded from that development). 
An assessment of the EoC today should then refer more than anything and primarily to this dimension of the project: the relationship between businesses and the excluded.  Only then should there be further assessment on the cultural or theoretical impact that the EoC had or has in the Church, in society and in academia (obviously all important aspects), beyond its capacity to make entrepreneurs more ethical or generous. 
From this perspective, we must admit that we´re still far from having fulfilled the vocation of the EoC. The success of such a project, in fact, is not measured on the number of the businesses that have become more ethical over these years and neither on the profits gathered and given (still too little). Neither is it measured by the development of the industrial parks. The EoC will be fully in line with its mission when it will become an economic and social model which is characterized by communion, and therefore, with a truly human face. To reach this goal, questioned everyday by our freedom and responsibility, there is need to know and want to face at least three demanding challenges.  
First of all, as both praxis and as culture, the EoC needs to put itself always more in network with the other experiences of social and civil economy that, in their way, try to humanize economy. It is a challenge that Chiara foreshadowed in her lectio magistralis in 1999 on the occasion of her honorary degree from Sacred Heart Catholic University in Piacenza. In the ten years that have followed that degree, some steps have been taken, but there is need to do more and to do so on a larger national and international scale. 
Secondly, poverty (which we prefer to call misery or exclusion, in way that is more appropriate and more in line with the Gospel) must be understood today in various ways. It can no longer be just the material poverty of the 1991 Brazilian favelas (although this dimension will always be central and important, as it is also often at the basis of other forms of poverty).   
Exclusion, solitude, lack of meaning in life, of true values, of ability, of rights and freedoms, of relationships – always more, these are the typical twenty-first century forms of poverty which are accompanied by the traditional ones. In particular, starting from the charism of unity of which the EoC expresses, it is urgent today to love and care for these forms of need which arise from broken relationships, from famine of relational goods, from various forms of disunity (private, civil and political), and for which the charism of unity, through its vocation, has eyes capable of seeing in order to transform these wound into blessings.
Therefore, it is necessary to launch a new phase of creativity and innovation, where various enterpreneurs and actors of the EoC, current and future, feel the freedom and responsibility to look at the old and new forms of poverty to find new solutions, always remembering that the first way of fighting exclusion and indigence is the work of creating and offering. 
Finally, it’s necessary to make a cultural and theoretical effort. Starting from the experience of these first years of the EoC and always in dialogue with many others, there is need to create a proposal of a new economic model that does not limit itself to the reflections on individual actions and on businesses. I’m convinced that economists, enterpreneurs and EoC workers have the potential to propose new models of development and institutional dynamics, which they offer as a contribution to that new economic order – environmentally, socially and spiritually sustainable, which so many are searching for today, and which is always more urgent to find. 
If the EoC is capable of reading and facing these challenges with “charismatic” courage, the prophecy of Chiara will become salt for history, and will therefore be able to give its contribution to the well living of the women and men of today, within and outside of markets. It is not by chance that this year, besides the Brazil 2011 event, the worldwide EoC launched a “youth project”, which will have two significant international schools: the first in Latin American and the second in Africa, both in January of 2011.
In the culture of consumption, the EoC can and must be a “resistence place”, not made of islands but of oases of communion and gratuitousness, as the abbeys were during Medieval times. In fact, we can remember that Chiara intuited the reality that would later become the EoC (the “chimneys”) for the first time while contemplating a Benedictan abbey from high upon the Swiss hills. Hers was a message of communion and gratuitousness that has great value today as, in a world where money tends to become everything because one can buy (almost) everything with it, the EoC is a reminder that the greatest wealth is that which is given and shared. This goes for people and for nations.
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    [text] => 
By now, the Economy of Communion is nearing its twentieth anniversary. A “place of resistence”.
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Citta Nuova n.21/2010 on 10/11/2010
At the end of May, 2011, everyone in the EoC will meet again in Sao Paulo to rediscover the roots of this experience and outline new prospects. The EoC is alive and growing in today’s history, through the crises and the hopes of our time. Chiara Lubich’s proposal to begin businesses and industrial parks, and then (in May of 1989) to start a cultural movement that would give “scientific dignity” to the praxis of the businesses, did not fall into an empty abyss. It was embraced by thousands of people, mostly within the Focolare Movement but recently even outside of it. They are people and institutions who are trying to make that seed produce fruit.
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One of the great pillars of the market economy, in particular the labor market, is the idea that the company does not buy people but working hours.
by Luigino Bruni
published on Città Nuova n.10/2011 on 25/05/2011

One of the great pillars of the market economy, in particular the labor market, is the idea that the company does not buy people but working hours. It is because the labor “market” was considered a particular market: on one part work is not merchandise but on the other work performance suffers and is subject to the law of supply and demand. Hence the importance that each country has been attributed to the social mediations (unions) and policies in this market.
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Recently, however, we are witnessing a major change: businesses not only will buy working hours but are looking to buy (and often succeed) the person, especially the youth with this line of reasoning: "I will pay you a lot, I promise you a brilliant career, but time does not exist, there are no limits.” 
This change also depends on a deeper transformation of our society and economy, namely the knowledge that if a worker does not put all his passion, creativity and intelligence in his work performance, businesses will not go forward. It is why one thinks that by paying more one can buy the person, including the heart, mind and passion. But in this operation a worm is hidden, a virus of our capitalist system: the illusion that once the boundary between work and life (because work becomes your life) is eliminated, that person can continue to flourish and mature over time.
In reality, the most important quality of a person is nurtured and grows also and mainly outside the company. And if the company buys me, it removes the possibility of cultivating these outside of work dimensions.  In fact, it is drying up wells from which I draw energy, passion and heart, finding myself completely empty after a few years, no longer useful to the company and often submerged on the rubble of familiar and relational. So if a company wants and needs to look for the best that its worker can give, it must make sure that there is always a surplus of life at work, that is, it needs to protect the space outside of work.
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One of the great pillars of the market economy, in particular the labor market, is the idea that the company does not buy people but working hours.
by Luigino Bruni
published on Città Nuova n.10/2011 on 25/05/2011

One of the great pillars of the market economy, in particular the labor market, is the idea that the company does not buy people but working hours. It is because the labor “market” was considered a particular market: on one part work is not merchandise but on the other work performance suffers and is subject to the law of supply and demand. Hence the importance that each country has been attributed to the social mediations (unions) and policies in this market.
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Taxes and Justice
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Cittanuova.it on 18/03/2010
Once again, we speak again about fiscal reform and the fight against tax evasion, a disease not only of the fiscal system but of all civil life as it undermines the roots of the "social pact" between citizens. Today, in a modern democracy, we should often remember the logic of taxation. Taxes (and levies) have three goals: they serve to redistribute income and wealth from the rich to the poor; they are an instrument to encourage the consumption of meritorious goods (art, education, culture...); and finally they serve to finance public goods, like streets, security or health.
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All three of these functions make sense within a society that feels itself linked by a pact, as it has a collective dimension which is greater than a sum of contracts and individual and private actions. Let´s think, for example, of public goods: if they cost 1000 and there are 100 of us paying our taxes, each one of us contributes 10 on average. But if we are 100 citizens and only 50 of these pay their taxes, whoever contributes pays 20, for themselves and for their "wily" co-citizens. That is why the social pact is undermined when tax evasion exceeds a critical threshold. It breaks the trust that keeps people and any political community together.
When We talk about the scandal of fiscal paradises - "places" where recycled money often travels, oozing with violence and blood - we should remember that fiscal purgatories also exist. They are where people who, even due to the sly person´s paradise, find themselves under too much unjust and unsustainable fiscal pressure. It´s a purgatory that transforms itself into hell when an entrepreneur that lives legally in sectors of high fiscal evasion is forced to close his business. The fiscal culture changes then over the long run, with the fatiguing art of daily virtuous actions, starting in school. It is not easy to answer a child who asks, "why do fiscal paradises exist?" but we can always wish him that his generation be the first to eliminate this collective shame.
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Taxes and Justice
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Cittanuova.it on 18/03/2010
Once again, we speak again about fiscal reform and the fight against tax evasion, a disease not only of the fiscal system but of all civil life as it undermines the roots of the "social pact" between citizens. Today, in a modern democracy, we should often remember the logic of taxation. Taxes (and levies) have three goals: they serve to redistribute income and wealth from the rich to the poor; they are an instrument to encourage the consumption of meritorious goods (art, education, culture...); and finally they serve to finance public goods, like streets, security or health.
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