Project Vision 21

I recently overheard a woman recounting how, after talking for several hours with two other women she barely knew, the three of them became friends. The reason, she said, is surprisingly simple: each listened to the others without interruption or changing the subject.

During the conversation, they sometimes laughed, sometimes talked, and there were even moments of tears and confessions. On more than one occasion, no one said anything. That silence didn't mean the conversation had ended. Nor did the need arise to fill it with words. They simply remained silent.

According to the woman, there were no screens involved during that entire time. No one looked at their phone while another was talking. No one momentarily disappeared behind a notification, a message, a photograph, or a conversation happening elsewhere. During those hours, the three of them remained there.

Thinking about that story reminded me of an ancient Greek word: megalopsychia , which is often translated as "greatness of soul." Aristotle speaks of the megalopsychos , the person who considers themselves worthy of great things and truly is. Opposite them are both vanity and mikropsychia , smallness of soul.

Naturally, it wouldn't make sense to simply transfer a philosophical category from ancient Greece to a conversation between three women in the 21st century. But perhaps we can use it to ask a question: What does it mean today to have a "great soul"?

We might immediately think of grand aspirations, power, prestige, money, or recognition. However, a person can possess all these things and still live permanently closed off within themselves; in other words, it's possible to have an enormous ego and a small soul.

Apuleius (writer and philosopher, 2nd century) linked the good life to an ordered soul that became less and less dependent on external things. The greatness of the soul, then, consisted not simply in accumulating more, but also in needing less in order to be fully oneself.

In other words, perhaps the smallness of the soul does not consist only in aspiring to little, but in not having inner space for anything other than oneself, thus rethinking how many of our opinions, worries, stories, wounds, answers, needs and reactions are really our own.

From that perspective, the conversation of those three women suggests, then, that a person can be "big" enough (metaphorically speaking) to make room for another.

That's what it means to listen deeply: to allow someone to finish a story without rushing them, to give an emotion the time it needs, and to allow an incomplete idea to develop before being judged. Sometimes it also means not responding. Perhaps that's why the silence of those women is so important.

It wasn't about empathy understood as immediately stating, "I know exactly how you feel," but about allowing the other person's experience to truly remain their own, without immediately turning it into a story about ourselves, even if it resonated with us. That skill develops over time.

Perhaps a “great soul” is one who offers presence, hospitality, and friendship even in the troubled 21st century.

The abundance of new laws, decrees, and ordinances at every level of government is a clear demonstration that the legal and judicial system is constantly playing catch-up in its effort to keep pace with the profound technological, social, and cultural changes of our time. At the same time, that abundance reveals something else: the decline of civic coexistence.

Several years ago, Argentine philosopher Darío Sztajnszrajber argued—this is not a direct quotation—that we have 19th-century schools, with 20th-century teachers, teaching 21st-century students. The same idea could be applied to justice: we have 19th-century laws, 20th-century judges, and 21st-century citizens. That discrepancy, I believe, contributes to the proliferation of laws.

But there is something more. As Horace warned centuries ago (Odes, III.24.35–36), Quid leges sine moribus / vanae proficiunt? (“What good are empty laws without morals?”). In other words, laws, decrees, and ordinances proliferate when decency and civic coexistence disappear, overwhelmed by a sea of individualism and narcissism.

In this context, the concept of mores is important because it does not refer simply to private “morality” in the modern sense. It encompasses customs, habits, social norms, inherited practices, and civic character. Put differently, Horace is asking: what can laws accomplish when the civic ethos necessary to sustain them has disappeared?

The question answers itself, as the facts of everyday life also demonstrate.

Tacitus, for his part, adds another warning in Annals III.27, similar to Horace’s but from a different perspective: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges (“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”). The proliferation of laws, then, reveals not only a mismatch between law and reality and the loss of civic ethos, but also the degree of corruption within the state.

Far from being a remedy, the multiplication of laws may instead be a symptom of the deterioration of civic and moral order. When fundamental norms—customs, character, and civic discipline, however they may be understood and practiced—have eroded, multiplying laws does not necessarily restore social coexistence.

This situation led me to think about what Hegel wrote in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History: “Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

The key phrase is “principles deduced from it.” Hegel is not suggesting that humanity is condemned simply to repeat the same empty mistakes. Rather, he meant that every historical epoch is unique and that the general lessons of the past cannot be directly applied to present crises, because those crises are different.

There is, therefore, one crucial factor in human life that neither an abundance of laws nor the lessons of the past can restore: love. Kierkegaard expressed it in the epilogue to Fear and Trembling: “No generation has learned from another how to love.”

Recently, I had the privilege of coordinating a community project that lasted several weeks. During the final gathering, we opened a space for participants to share their opinions and experiences regarding the project. An older woman immediately began to speak and, for the next 20 minutes, recounted in detail the hardships and challenges of her life.

No one laughed or appeared uncomfortable. No one asked her to stop or to allow others to speak. The participants listened attentively, without interrupting or asking questions. The group simply allowed something unscripted to happen: someone, perhaps for the first time, shared important moments from her life that very few people probably knew about.

It took me weeks of reflection to understand that, at a liminal moment, as our gatherings were coming to an end, this woman found the temporary community we had created psychologically safe enough to share, spontaneously and whether consciously or not, such personal information. In telling her story, she also discovered it for herself.

In other words, the gatherings allowed her not only to learn the material being presented but also, and more importantly, to weave together separate and disparate events that, once connected, restored both her memory and her narrative coherence. Her life story, then, became her feedback, her commentary, and her opinion of the project.

At the opposite extreme, I know a man who, after acquiring a certain reputation in one particular field, believes that this “authority” can be immediately transferred to any other subject, regardless of how far removed it may be from his education and experience. And so he speaks and pontificates about politics, religion, sports, movies, mental health, or whatever else may arise.

It is well known that confidence in one’s own knowledge tends to increase rather than decrease among people with limited knowledge, a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This produces an epistemological mismatch that, consciously or not, prevents a person from accurately estimating how much they truly know or do not know about a subject, while doing nothing to prevent them from expressing an opinion about it.

Contemporary society, by blurring the boundaries between personal reaction and informed analysis, rewards precisely those who, instead of asking themselves, “Am I the right person to speak about this subject?” ask, “What do I have to say about this subject?” A positive response from the audience then leads the person to regard those opinions as validated.

I wonder what would happen if the woman mentioned above told her story to the man mentioned above, but I will leave that thought experiment for another time. Still, when these two modes of interaction are placed side by side, it becomes clear that the woman was saying, “I want you to know something about me,” while the man was saying, “I want you to know that I have something important to say.”

For the woman, this may have been her only opportunity to tell the story of her life, and so she did so with authenticity and vulnerability. The man, by contrast, must “perform” authority before an audience that demands his constant presence: authentic self-disclosure versus performative self-presentation.

So, which person are we?

Recently, I read a story (probably fictional) about the CEO of a company who keeps an empty chair beside his desk because his late brother was the company’s cofounder. Beyond this story, the empty chair appears independently in numerous cultures, religions, therapeutic practices, organizations, and families.

In fact, when I was a child, my family and I often visited some neighbors who always kept an empty chair at the table (and even a plate of food in front of it) because, as I recall, “you never know who might knock on the door and become a guest at our dinner.”

In many families, the empty chair represents a loved one who has left this world, a family member who emigrated to another country, or even a missing person whose current situation is unknown. The empty chair is a physical representation of the fact that the connection continues, that the relationship has been transformed but has not ended.

In another context, the empty chair appears in Judaism and Christianity, as well as in Eastern and Indigenous religious traditions, whether to remember a prophet, emphasize the presence of the Messiah, honor ancestors, or represent an act of hospitality toward unexpected guests.

The German psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who lived in the 20th century and coined the term “Gestalt therapy,” used the empty-chair technique so that patients could engage in an imagined conversation with someone with whom they needed to resolve an issue, such as a deceased parent, an estranged spouse, their future self, or even God.

From an anthropological perspective, the empty chair represents a ritual that, through its symbolism, reveals and illuminates the presence of absence: something that cannot be explained in words but can only be lived or experienced. For that reason, the empty chair becomes a kind of threshold between what is and what is not, what was and what will be.

In any case, the empty chair is not merely an invitation to remember a past that is gone or to think about a future that will never arrive. The empty chair can be interpreted as a way of recognizing that human identity is fundamentally relational and that, for this reason, an open space is preserved, symbolized by the chair, in which relationships continue to emerge.

In other words, the empty chair is the space in which absence becomes presence. Absence is not erased; rather, it finds in the empty chair a way to become present, acting as a kind of “portal” between the visible and invisible dimensions of human experience.

Then the question is no longer, “Who should sit in the empty chair?” but rather, “Who will occupy the other chairs when humanity’s chair becomes empty?”