The current crisis is an extreme one; it is a crisis that questions the basic fundamentals of our culture. In abstract terms it means a crisis that questions our current paradigm. In concrete terms it expresses a crisis of the dream and of the ideology that has guided the world for centuries. What kind of dream was this? This was the dream of unlimited development, a willingness to achieve power and dominate other people, other nations and nature itself.

More than the cogito, ergo sum, or “I think therefore I am,” of Descartes is the conquero, ergo sum, or “I conquer, therefore I am,” of Hernán Cortez, who conquered and destroyed the original populations of Mexico. This expresses well the dynamics of modernity. The popes of the time, Nicolas V (1447–1455) and Alexander (1492–1503) granted divine legitimacy to the European attitude of domination. In the name of God it was given to the imperialist powers of the time, the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, “the full power and liberty to invade, conquer, combat, triumph and submit the pagans, and to seize for themselves and use for their own benefit the lands, possessions and goods belonging to these pagans… Because His Divine Majesty agrees that the barbaric nations must be reduced and brought over to the Christian faith.”