The most poignant exemplar of this addictive behaviour today is the social response to climate change, in which enormous scientific, intellectual, political, diplomatic, and emotional resources have been mobilized to violate all our precepts on a magnificent scale in a top-down, knowledge-based control fantasy aimed at modifying the evolution of the coupled human-Earth system in particular ways.

It is a widely held notion that we are a disillusioned people living in a disenchanted age. Indeed, a belief that scientific advance inevitably leads to the demystification of the world - an eventuality that is sometimes celebrated and sometimes deplored - is so prevalent that is virtually a modern axiom.
But to interpret mystery so passively - to think of it as being merely the effect of ignorance - is to neglect the implications of the active verb form: to mystify. Mystification does not, exclusively, happen: it can also be enacted. To mystify and to demystify are valid alternatives which humans can, if they choose, use in the pursuit of their individual or collective purposes.

Virocentrismo. Insieme di pregiudizi cognitivi e fallacie logiche che falsano la percezione dell’emergenza Covid. La prima impressione ricavata in un momento di forte inquietudine e paura - «il virus ci ucciderà tutti!» - persiste e si rafforza: il pensiero è inesorabilmente catturato dal virus e dalla sua circolazione, ogni ragionamento gira intorno all’eventualità del contagio e ogni rischio che non sia il contagio passa in secondo piano.