In Greece, October 28 marks the anniversary of the historic Ochi — the “No” that became a symbol of resistance to fascism.
On the morning of October 28, 1940, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, attacked Greece, invading from Albania under the pretext of protecting the Vlach minority in Epirus. The answer came on the snow-covered mountains of Albania. Greek soldiers, fighting with limited resources against a better-equipped and well-organized army, thwarted the Italian dictator’s ambitions and demonstrated that military superiority does not guarantee victory.
A year later, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader of Germany, invaded Greece with his own forces, imposing a brutal occupation that brought immense suffering and destruction. Greece would remain under occupation until the collapse of the Axis powers.
Today, beyond honoring the memory of those who fought fascism and resisted Nazism, we owe the dead something more: the willingness to think, to question, and to learn. Not merely on anniversaries. And certainly not only in Greece.
How did humanity descend into a catastrophe in which the ambitions and decisions of political leaders brought millions of deaths, countless wounded and disabled people, devastated cities, and tragedies beyond the limits of human imagination?
And, even more disturbingly, how is it possible that, only a few decades after the devastation of the Second World War, we once again face authoritarian rulers, escalating military threats, and the specter of a new global catastrophe?
Yesterday, we discussed power here on Homo-Naturalis.gr: the institution that, throughout history and under different political systems, has so often brought suffering upon the very societies it claims to serve.
And so the question returns, spontaneously, logically, almost inevitably:
Would the world be a better place without traditional structures of political power?
Could there be another way of organizing human societies, one better equipped to secure the fundamental conditions of life itself: survival, safety, freedom, and justice?
Might organized societies achieve incomparably better results if they moved beyond governance models that have been tested for centuries yet repeatedly failed to guarantee these basic goods — models that too often leave them dependent on the ambitions, self-interest, and arbitrary decisions of those who hold power?
And what if the real obstacle is not the supposedly utopian nature of alternative forms of social organization, but the propaganda of those who have every reason to reject them? Those who continually invoke the specters of disorder, chaos, and the law of the jungle to persuade us that any alternative to the established system must inevitably end in disaster?
The answer could be — and perhaps is — much simpler than we are encouraged to believe. We need only allow history to speak, rather than surrender its interpretation to those who benefit from the existing order. We must resist the confusion, opacity, and public disorientation that so often accompany the exercise of power.
Consider, for example, this question: could Vladimir Putin honestly account for how many lives might have been saved in Russia and Ukraine if political power operated according to different principles, under different institutional constraints, rather than the model he embodies and enforces?
And could we fully assess the human cost of the Second World War — the deaths, the abuse, the physical devastation, and the psychological trauma — without examining not only the decisions of individual leaders but also the structures of power that enabled them to impose those decisions on entire populations?
Many will, of course, object: “But not everyone who exercises power is deranged, corrupt, or morally depraved.”
Of course not.
Yet the fundamental question remains: throughout human history, even under supposedly milder forms of government, when have respect for human life, peace, security, and justice been consistently guaranteed to everyone? Can anyone point to even one historical period in which these principles were genuinely secured for all?
Perhaps it is time to stop treating as eternal and inevitable what we have merely grown accustomed to accepting as normal.
We must be prudent. But we must also remain open to the possibilities of our age.
Artificial Intelligence is emerging as a global force with the potential to transform production, resource management, decision-making, and the organization of society. Why, then, should we not seriously examine whether it could help us build fairer and more effective systems of social coordination and governance?
Could the time have come to experiment with alternative models of administering and coordinating our societies, using this new intelligence precisely where traditional political power has repeatedly failed?
Not, of course, to replace human arbitrariness with the unchecked arbitrariness of algorithms. Nor to surrender our freedom and our future to a new, impersonal authority. Rather, we should explore whether knowledge, transparency, accountability, and technological capability can serve the common good more effectively than the traditional systems we have inherited.
And if those who have a vested interest in retaining control refuse any meaningful change, might a collective, worldwide expression of popular will be needed to bring it about democratically?
A revolution unlike those that came before it. Not another change of personnel at the top of the power structure, but a fundamental transformation in how we organize our lives, distribute resources, make decisions, and safeguard human dignity.
A revolution whose success would not be measured by its declarations or promises, but by whether it finally achieves what previous historical attempts have failed to accomplish: making freedom, peace, security, and justice genuine and universal goods.
Tomorrow, Diotima will be here.
To take on the difficult task of proposing a path that could turn the world “upside down” — overturning not human dignity or social cohesion, but our entrenched assumptions about power, politics, and the very organization of human life.
For if the history of the centuries teaches us anything, it is that generation after generation continues to dream of fundamental change, even as the systems that promise to deliver it ultimately reproduce the same inequalities, the same dependencies, and the same dangers.
Perhaps, then, the time has finally come to stop dreaming of a different world — and start designing one.