I recently visited Hiroshima and stood at the epicenter of a city scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945. What I saw, the stories I heard, and the haunting sadness that remains will stay with me forever.

(Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, USA)

When I got bored with the nonsense and emptiness of politics, I returned to Ancient Greece.

(Georges Clemenceau)

Wayfarer, do go tell of voices you have heard from those who fell… that every shred of good that comes with life was freely given by those now dead. Wayfarer, tell what you have heard through tears and from the many voices from the ground.

(V. Rotas)

Pain so intense, never forgotten, even in sleep, until falling from the heart, drop by drop, in despair, against our will, wisdom ever so slowly comes through the terrible grace of God. He gave us a philosophical roadmap to peace.

(Aeschylus, in his expression of despair)

With humanity held in the clutches of social dementia and wrapped in the shadow of Armageddon, we need a significant boost of confidence. This can only arise through the application of philosophy in decision-making and a different way to monitor the status of our world. To achieve this, we need the will of humanity to help mankind hold on to a world where human creativity is infinite and its talent is profound. We need political leadership with cognitive and emotional intelligence, imbued with managerial competence and empathy. We need leaders who see and comprehend the ongoing and accumulating damage to global public health and understand the need for philosophy in all policies.

Fleetingly, the United Nations (Ban Ki-moon) and UNESCO (Irina Bokova) promoted the concept of global citizenship to reflect the thinking of Socrates, but no country has shown any inclination or true enthusiasm to support such a concept. This includes Italy and Greece, cradles of European development and civilization. Even the UN and UNESCO are in retreat. Even those who were once gungho have retreated to the rear.Will it always be business as usual?

Eric Schwitzgebel says philosophical inquiry makes the entire planet better than it would otherwise be… helps us to stand in awe at the awesomeness of Earth. Philosophy needs no excuse, for there is nothing else so intrinsically valuable. By sidestepping or rejecting the application of philosophy to the world’s existential problems, geopolitical forces have facilitated planetary warming and encouraged the denial of climate change. They have downplayed poverty, both of body and mind, and fail to see the increasing gaps in life expectancy and socioeconomic inequality.

In congratulating Donald Trump as the incoming president of the USA, I suggested that his warrior culture consider wearing the garments of philosophy. I urged him, as president, to give much more thought to public health, to Obamacare, and to the support of the WHO. I reminded him of the proclamation of Martin Luther King, to whom he had referred, namely, that of all forms of inequality, health injustice is the most shocking and inhumane. Policy can improve the status quo but wrongful policy can influence it negatively. We have yet to come to terms with the political determinants of health.

Dear Meer, let me ask you, would you ever do what The Times of London once did when it asked its readers, "What’s wrong with the world?" It was an essay competition won by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote, "Dear Sirs, I am!" In the same vein, I recently asked a similar question: Is Greece back at ground zero? It was in an article as I revisited Mati. I requested that it be placed in its English section. My second question was, will Greece go up or down in flames? These questions reflect those of yesteryear, one from 1874 by the then Greek Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis, titled Who is to Blame?

It was an attempt to examine the factors that led to a political and economic crisis at a time of misfortune, poverty, and corruption, with politicians blaming the people for it. It was also an effort to restore confidence in the government. He denounced illegal methods to win parliamentary seats and called for greater social transparency. It is an appropriate question for today, for the international community, for civil society, and for all societies and governments. Today, the question is: How can we turn back the tide of humanity’s social dementia and pull back a world on the threshold of Armageddon?

As the international community treads water, waiting for the next tsunami, the benefits of classical philosophy are ignored. When tomorrow comes, risk will follow, and public health and philosophy will be needed more than ever. I’m optimistic! If tomorrow fails us, risk will have no meaning, and those who survive and can still kiss will kiss the future goodbye. Here, perhaps you should stop reading? Don’t worry, be happy. Make babies. As told by anthropology, not doing so can cause a global catastrophe. Such an unlikely cessation of births could become more plausible following some other global catastrophe. A no birth world would gradually undermine our ability and know-how to produce food, provide healthcare, and accomplish everything that daily life depends on.

Greece should re-recruit its roots, repackage them as a contribution to a Europe in trouble, and offer for itself a more accepting space for philosophy at home. My proposal ahead of the most recent European elections. Was that Greek society and politics must retreat from a seemingly casual approach to threats and the world must redefine public health as the 'common language of humanity' (lingua franca) as a tool and dynamic force for improved diplomacy across boundaries to better serve international relations. Surely, peace and diplomacy are better ways of settling disputes? Greece must not only decide what it will do for the future of the Greek people but also on how it will or will not fulfill its historical mission under extremely difficult social, economic, and political conditions and corresponding international circumstances.

Socrates, when teased about his smarts, told his colleagues that if he, like them, had had the means to take more advanced classes from Prodikos, he would have been much smarter. His message is clear! Society should always ensure the best education for its brightest, as well as education for all. He visualized order and chaos and discerned both the demographic problem of his day and the need for philosophical thinking in a global arena in which global citizens could think freely. His advice to young people: fall in love, get married, and have children. If marriage works, perfect! If not, become philosophers. In one short sentence, he focused on demography and philosophy. Of course, if applied today, it would mean that there would be more philosophers in the ranks of the unemployed than any other group. Just another problem?

Waiting for the end of his life in hours, Socrates learned one last song and sent a rooster to his healer as payment for previous health services he had received. In doing so, he secured his position as the father of lifelong learning and, with the cockerel, messaged us that the future of our children should not be burdened with debts from the present. His new kind of thinking, which challenged the elite, made him a scapegoat for the loss of Athenian imperial status. He was criminally vilified as a spy for Sparta. An amnesty between the two superpowers, Athens and Sparta, prevented the poet Meletus and his co-accusers from seeking the death sentence on political grounds. So, finally, he was charged on religious grounds. He told the court, “In killing me, you injure Athens and Athenians more.” He went on to say, “I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours.” Needless to say, the Socratic School viewed society as a huge insane asylum, which today makes it a powerful tool for the study of social dementia. The woman who inspired his mindset that changed history has never been revealed.

Here, I add that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and Hygiene, the goddess of public health, were not recognized in the top ten of Great Greeks/Greek women. Several greats with close ties to public health in the modern era have gone unrecognized, two being Kapodistrias and Eleftherios Venizelos. The latter was the only politician ever to create two schools of public health in two different countries. They were destroyed as a result of the Asia Minor Disaster, while the Athens School was chopped down by a socialist axe in 2019 by a former government that commissioned an international report on Mati, even though the ugly duckling of Greece had done the same work and more. Within the polarization of politics, most governments have betrayed public health, to a lesser or greater degree, while the loud media voices on all things remained silent before and after the axe fell. Today the historical discontinuity is presented as natural evolution.

If philosophy is treated as a social investment, then delinquency, abuse, and corruption will decline. Health security will be enhanced, logic will prevail, and the number of scandals, fraudulent places, and sociopolitical toxicity will decrease. What we have to deal with today I call and designate social dementia, which implies a regression in gains accumulated from evolution, from the development of science, from formal and informal education, as well as from well-demonstrated and refined cultures. In other words, social dementia results from a reversal of human brain development and decision-making processes, from higher levels of the cortex to a lower level, which can be designated as reptilian.

It implies a battle of titans between self-serving individuals wanting more (power and profit) and collective well-being in a spirit of sharing. It is representative of conflict between realities and fake realities, all of which have been composed within the collective brain, aided and abetted by mass media. Overall, it is a case of losing paradise—humanity and its habitat—and Paradise Regained: salvaging the beauty of the earth. One side of the coin is to imagine a world with very few survivors, with shattered states, and with completely destroyed natural, cultural, and human environments. This is what youth is doing—angry with our steering of the world! But are they being heard?

The neural forces driving the rise of social dementia can be mitigated only by appropriate and adequate levels of education in the family, in society, and in schools and universities. Mitigation that re-enforces truth over lies which now faces opposition from the stealthily used and useful instrument of denial, which also downplays growing poverty and universal inequality. War and nuclear war are in the head, and we have the responsibility to take them out! Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Peace is in the head of the beholder. Unless we have many more beholders, peace will always be a chimera. Social dementia portrays a world with empathy—but not for all—governed mainly by controllers and manipulators who inflict fear, promote mystification, obfuscate, and cover up—a world in which slow, massive suicide is an ongoing process. Any ongoing process can be jacked up by positive feed-forward or positive feedback or reined in by negative feedback. In a framework of ignorance and the absence of communication, we should expect the worst.

According to Herophilus, when health is absent, wisdom cannot be revealed, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence is diminished—an aphorism that, 2000 years on, is paraphrased in the parchment of the first postgraduate degree (1931) awarded by the Athens School of Public Health (1929): In the absence of population health, life loses value. Today, I would say that when philosophy is absent, wisdom dies, innovation is blind, riches become all that matters, consumerism may be crowned king, know-how takes the course to know-not, and intelligence slips from the upper cortex and expresses itself as social dementia.

Today, there are about 3,000 billionaires and billions more who are pulling themselves out of poverty with a few additional bucks and the political world praises itself. I believe, and I say I believe advisedly because I cannot know for certain, that by strengthening practical philosophy treated as a social investment, delinquency will decline, security will be enhanced, and logic will improve, as demonstrated with the eradication of scandals, fraud, manipulation, and toxicity.

While in press, the writer noted the following publications:

  1. Humanity is playing nuclear roulette (Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic); the contours of WWIII are visible in the conflicts in Ukraine, between India and Pakistan, and now between Israel and Iran, warning that humans will need luck to survive.

  2. How long would humanity survive if we stopped having children? Such an event would lead to the collapse of civilization. This is a question asked by anthropologist Michael A. Little in his article for young people. If births cease today, 100 years on, there will be no humans left on Earth. In between now and then, the population will decline as the elderly die, the number of young people who carry out essential tasks will fall, and society will slowly—and then rapidly—collapse. This scenario, says Professor Little, will not be a pleasant one at all.

  3. Truth in the time of collapse: why global health advocacy must be our act of resistance, a message from Elishe George, Global Health Council, advocating for global public health and its work and moral and political dimensions. Noting that public health sabotage is cloaked in propaganda, that truth-telling (at a time of social dementia) is an act of resistance, and quoting Paul Farmer, the idea that "some lives matter less" is the root of all that is wrong with it. This is the public health answer to what’s wrong with our world. Interdisciplinary public health knows well where the blame lies.