Einstein’s phrase is very true today: «a crisis cannot be resolved by the mentality that created it.» It is too late to just make reforms; they do not change the mentality. We need to start from another frame of mind, founded in principles and values that can sustain a new form of civilization. Otherwise, we will have to accept a path that leads us to the precipice. The dinosaurs have already gone down that path.

My sense of the world tells me that there are four principles and four virtues capable of guaranteeing a good future for the Earth and for life. I will only mention them, without elaboration, which I have already done in several publications in recent years.

The first principle is caring. Caring is a relationship of non-aggression and love towards the Earth and every other being. Caring stands in opposition to the domination that characterizes the old paradigm. Caring heals the wounds of the past and avoids new ones. It delays entropy’s unrestrained force and allows everyone to live and withstand more. The equivalent of caring for the Orientals is compassion; therefore, Orientals never abandon those who suffer; one walks in solidarity with, and brings happiness to, the other who suffers.

The second is respect. Every being possesses an intrinsic value, independent of its utility to humans. Every being expresses a potentiality of the universe, has something to reveal to us and deserves to exist and to live. Respect recognizes and welcomes the other as other, and proposes to peacefully coexist. Its ethic is one of boundless respect for everything that exists and lives.

The third is universal responsibility. Because of it, human beings and society are aware of the beneficial or damaging consequences of their actions. Both have to be careful of the quality of their relations with the other and with nature, so that they may be friendly, rather than hostile, to life. With the means of destruction already in existence, humanity, without responsibility, could self-destruct, and damage the biosphere.

The fourth principle is unconditional cooperation. The universal law of evolution is not competition, where the stronger wins out, but interdependency. Everything cooperates with everything else, to co-evolve and assure bio-diversity. Because of mutual cooperation, our ancestors became humans. Globalized marketing is ruled by the most rigid competition, with no room for cooperation. Therefore, the individualism and egoism that underlie the present crisis, and have thus far foreclosed any possible consensus on climate change, have prevailed.

These four principles must come with four virtues, indispensable for the consolidation of the new order.

The first virtue is hospitality, fundamental for a world republic, according to Kant. We all have the right to be welcome, the converse of the duty to welcome the other. This virtue will be fundamental as we face the streams of people and the millions of climate refugees who will emerge in the next few years. They should not be, as they are now, outsiders to the community.

The second is good fellowship with those who are different. Globalization of the human experiment does not annul the cultural differences with which we must learn to coexist, to inter-exchange, to compliment each other, and to enrich each other with these mutual exchanges.

The third is tolerance. Not all cultural values and customs are convergent and easy to accept. Active tolerance is important for recognizing the right of the other to exist as different, and to guarantee total expression to the other.

The fourth is comestibles. All human beings must, in solidarity, have access to sufficient food, and food security. They must feel like members of one family, that eats and drinks together. Food as nourishment is not only necessary, it is also about a rite of confraternity.

All our efforts will be in vain if Río+20, of 2012, discusses only practical measures to mitigate global warming, without touching other principles and values that could generate a minimum consensus, thus giving sustainability to our civilization. If not, the crisis will continue its corrosive path, until it becomes a tragedy. We have the means and science to reach sustainability. We lack only the will, and love for life, ours and that of our children and grandchildren. May the Spirit that presides over history not abandon us.

From the point of view of the great majority of humanity, the present order is in disarray, created and maintained by the forces and countries that benefit from it, thus increasing their power and profits. This disarray derives from the fact that economic globalization has not brought about a political globalization. Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, two Nobel laureates in economics, criticize president Obama for surrendering to the Wall Street thieves instead of putting the brakes on them. After having caused the crisis, they still benefited from thousands of millions in grants of public funds. And then they returned happily to the system of financial speculation.

Those exceptional economists are very good at making analyses, but they are mute when it comes to offering solutions to the present crisis. Perhaps, as has been suggested, it is because they are convinced that the solution to the economy is not in economics, but in remaking the social relations destroyed by the market economy, especially by speculation. The market economy has no compassion and lacks any world, social and political goal. Its purpose is to accumulate to the maximum and in the process, it must subjugate states, break down legislation, undermine labor laws, and create national economies, forcing countries in crisis to privatize everything that can be sold, throwing the people into poverty and desperation.

For the speculators, also in Brazil, money is used for producing more money, and not for producing more goods for those who need them. Here in Brazil, the government must pay more than one hundred thousand million dollars annually for past loans, while Brazil devotes only about sixty thousand million to social projects. This disparity causes the ethically perverse consequence of a type of society that is forced to maintain the economy as the principal structural axis, and turn everything into merchandise, even the common goods necessary for life, such as water, seeds, the air and the earth.

There are many who maintain the thesis that we are in a dramatic moment of decomposition of the social bonds. Alain Touraine even talks of the post-social, instead of the post-industrial, phase.

This social decomposition is seen in polarization, or radically opposing logics: the logic of productive capital, about 60 billion dollars per year, and the logic of speculative capital, about 600 billion dollars, under the aegis of «greed is good.» The logic of those who defend making the greatest profit possible and the logic of those who struggle for the right to life, humanity and the Earth. The logic of individualism that destroys the «common home,» increasing the numbers of those who no longer want to coexist, and the logic of social solidarity, starting with the most vulnerable. The logic of the elites that make the intra-systemic changes and appropriate the benefits, and the logic of the salaried people, threatened with unemployment and lacking the capacity to intervene. The logic of the acceleration of material growth (Brazil) and the logic of the limits of each eco-system and of the Earth herself.

There is a generalized disbelief that anything good can come to humanity from the dominant system. We are going from bad to worse in everything that relates to life and nature. The future depends on the degree of trust that peoples have in their capabilities and in the authentic possibilities of reality. And this trust is decreasing daily.

We are facing a dilemma: either we let things continue the way they are, and perish in a terminal crisis, or we engage in creating a new social life that will support a different type of civilization. The new social bonds will not come from present day technology or politics, divorced from nature and from a synergic relationship with the Earth. They will be born of a minimal consensus among humans, that must be built around the recognition of and respect for the rights of life, of each social subject, of humanity and of the Earth, considered as Gaia, and as our common Mother. Technology, politics, institutions, and the values of the past must be in the service of this new social life.

I have been thinking and writing about these things for at least twenty years. But who is listening? It is a voice lost in the desert. A desolate Marx would say: «I cried out, and saved my soul» (clamavi et salvavi animam meam).