I reiterate: I refuse to take sides. Most of the time, I refuse effortlessly, since the faults of others are glaringly obvious. I refuse, with difficulty, all the more so if it seems to me that they are right.
Refusing to take sides is my way of controlling my excesses, my arrogance, my delusion of omniscience.
I choose to deny myself the right to defend my reasons, opposing them to wrongs—even those suffered—to prevent others from suffering in turn my abuses, my prejudices. I know this for sure, because it has already happened and would happen again: I will change my mind, the world will change. My reasons will lose their bite, usefulness, effectiveness, overtaken by time, by new needs and new priorities.
Then my consistency will become fundamentalism, my determination tyranny and injustice. Even my best intentions will become the premises of a strategy, perhaps of development, of social evolution, of peace, to be preserved at the expense of some renewal tendency that, even if just, would threaten to overwhelm me.
History is not at all the clash between good and evil, as now only Hollywood actors claim, nor between thesis and antithesis. It is in fact the history of those who survive the confrontations, the traumas caused by conflicts, after the antagonists have slaughtered each other enough and no longer have the interest or resources to feel opposed, even if deep down they keep the feeling alive—that will die with them.
Reluctantly, they sign, if they still have the strength, armistices and truces, the shaky foundation of a peace that presupposes that peace exists, even if it never does, based on the idea that people will always agree for the common good, while they badly and incompetently take care even of their own interests. This is a peace that most have never had, that most never wanted, while the non-aligned already had and would always have it, except for bowing as expected to flags and majorities… peace and acid stomach.