The Gold Curtain

It is not a minor paradox that the consumer society of the end of this millennium does not stop enhancing the options of inventions and gadgets, which are more or less useless, and made for a happy few, while the large majority lives in such extreme poverty that it could be compared to slave conditions in the Egyptian society of the Pharaohs.

This is one the shocks which can be seen everyday in the streets and in television programs, and are, in this book, analyzed by Cristovam Buarque: the unbelievable gap between technological advances and social stagnation at the end of a century so omniscient as far as technique is concerned but so impotent as regards the solution of persistent social problems.

Confident that they were in the right path, men accelerated the rhythm of History and despised Ethics. According to Cristovam Buarque – one of the most important scholars and politicians of his generation – it is now time to abandon the pursuit of unlimited progress and try to follow the path of Ethics, otherwise we can be doomed to lose everything we have achieved until our present time.