1. The West has never waned, and today it is more alive than ever

The planet, in contrast to a decline that is often erroneously affirmed, is now experiencing the maximum phase of westernization, integral and planetary. The reason? Simple. The true ultimate essence of the West is the development of knowledge on always neew frontiers. And it is on the last western frontiers – Internet and AI – that the planet lives today for its social and economic development. 

Whatever the boring book by the Teutonic Spengler predicted, the West has never waned: it has constantly moved further west, until it reached the Pacific Ocean, where it has stopped for a new vision of geography — no longer linked to terrestrial surfaces, but to satellite locations.

Athens was the West of Troy. Rome was the West of Athens. Manhattan was the West of Manchester. Big Sur is the West of New York, and Palo Alto is the end of this transfer, because from Silicon Valley onwards the new western frontiers are in the ether and in a new definition of Knowledge. 

The West does not set down: instead is a cultural geography that moves. This is why Berlin has never been the West, because its leaders insist on remaining Teutonic. China, which rightly aspires to diplomatic multipolarity and to the integrity of its territories, is second world’s power  because it has absorbed Western cultural growth mechanisms, which Russia has not succeeded to do. In this Asia that faces the world with rightly multipolar aspirations, India is actually the westernmost of the Asian nations because it is the first nation to want to calculate the wealth of the nation in the production of knowledge: from Plato to  Shankaracharya, via Buddha and Abinavagupta. Buddha is the man that Bertrand Russell in an interview with the BBC judged as a man superior to Jesus Christ. “I value Christ as a man regardless of his divine nature”. Buddha, contrary to what is usually believed, did not establisd a religion, he had no intention of doing so and he declared that he absolutely did not want to do it, instead he based all his endless teachings on the pillar of KNOWLEDGE. In the Dammapada, essential of his teaching, he assertes that The Man, (and obviously the woman) is what he (she) knows. Since I perfectly agree on this assumption, it is possible to sayh that “Knowledge” is the logical thread that must be remembered when thinking of the West, because the most profound and intimate nature of the West is the development of knowledge. And this is the reason why the West lives and progresses even today, to the point that it can be said that the world of the twenty-first century is still a world based on the West. 

2. Highway 101, the new Eden

At the time when I was working with my friend Archie, an extraordinary academic figure with an absolute exceptional university managerial culture, I had the privilege of working together regularly in Los Angeles but to develop common projects we also met in Berkeley. At the time I had the habit of booking the flight from Europe to the USA in the opposite city to the one where I had to work: I went to Los Angeles if I had to meet Archie in Berkeley, I went to San Francisco if I had to work at UCLA. The reason for this deliberate strangeness was that then, in a strictly Hertz car, I set off early in the morning in the opposite direction. It was not simply a tourist habit — of immeasurably........

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