Among the many fatal legacies of the pandemic there is a happy one. The indirect reassessment of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book first misunderstood, then mocked and finally forgotten by the evolution of capitalism unable to accept that society is not born from selfishness or the expectation of earnings but from sympathy for others based on self-love.
For Smith it is only in this logic that the primary and individualistic impulses - the infamous animal spirits - manage to rise in a horizon of reciprocity and evolution, economic but even more of life and happiness. An idea that the Scottish illuminist Smith leaves to his successors who will come to overthrow it in the prevailing vision of the last thirty years, which Milton Friedman summarized in the only social responsibility of the entrepreneur: increasing profits.
With the pandemic, everything changes because Covid-19 demonstrates that the essence of our model was not based on strength but on fragility. Of the health, logistic, bureaucratic, information systems. And even before the cultural, scientific, linguistic ones.

The real opportunity of the actual crisis is then the possibility of overturning our approach by putting empathy, benevolence and caring at the center of every action and decision. Not as an exceptional resource but as a natural rule, not as an emergency therapy but as an ordinary logic to redesign relationships, economy, society.
A vision that does justice to the Scottish master and that three years ago was relaunched by The care manifesto, a collective work by the homonym English group (Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, Lynne Segal) just translated into Italian based on four operational principles: mutual aid, availability of public spaces, non-commercialized sharing, local democracy. Without ever mentioning Smith, but so be it.

Opening image by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash