Abstract
«A collateral victim»1 of the Spanish flu epidemic: these are the words that Edgar Morin (2020) uses to define himself in his Pream-ble: One hundred years of vicissitudes, written during the lockdown im-posed to stem the spread of Covid-19. Over a handful of pages, the French philosopher and sociologist gives a first-person account of his own personal life in relation to the history of the great crises of the 20th Century. His preamble to the book Let’s change lanes: Lessons of Coronavirus reads as follows: «The reader can now understand why I find it normal to expect the unexpected and to foresee that the unpredictable may happen»2 (Morin, 2020, p. 22). Over the course of the text, Morin’s readers are also brought to understand why the author has not «completely lost hope» (Morin, 2020, p. 22).
Hence, the beauty of the words of Morin, as a «transversal thinker» (Montuori, 2019, p. 408), is collateral: his lucid analysis does indeed retrace the catastrophic events that have arisen during the pandemic, underlining human beings’ predisposition to dystopian attitudes, yet it simultaneously highlights key steps towards fostering that humanism necessary to change the path.