Description

The Sleep of Reason Produces Shadows
In 1797 Francisco Goya realized one of his most famous engravings, "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos", the work had a purely symbolic meaning: if the man acts preferring the instinct (the strength and the violence) to the reason the consequences are terrible. Today, like yesterday, the examples of monstrosity generated by the sleep of reason are innumerable, but certainly the war has always been the most feared and frightening nightmare. With the production of increasingly devastating atomic weapons (I think of the current Russian project of building missiles like SR-28 Sarmat, better known as Satan 2, capable of incinerate a large territory such as Texas or France), in the case of nuclear conflict, humanity is really in danger of extinction. This time however, if human civilization will have disappeared, the sleep of the reason won't produce monsters anymore, in fact, only rubble remains, some of which with the characteristics shadows produced by the atomic explosions. I think in 2017 the time has come to update Goya's famous admonition, from "the sleep of reason produces monsters" to "the sleep of reason produces shadows"; if today man in dealing with controversy does not use the reason the consequences could be not only monstrous but also lethal: a conflict with nuclear weapons could lead to the self-destruction of humanity.