2' min read
2' min read
Today, 56 armed conflicts are being fought in the world. This is the highest number recorded since the end of World War II. In the past year, there were at least 233,000 victims and more than 100 million human beings were forced to flee their homes and emigrate in search of peace. We are sadly accustomed to images of bloodshed and can now only divide ourselves into prejudiced supporters. Yet, a different way to explain one's motivations, to seek the reasons for productive coexistence instead of the hard power of bombs or strangling finance, exists. Soft power.
The force of persuasion that comes from that immovable engine of attraction that is the force, sweet, of ideas. Of ideals, of values. Of art as the highest expression of that feeling. On closer inspection, no army in the world has been able to go against the values of a people. Paradoxically, not even the atomic bomb has been able to impose a culture on a community. Knowledge, on the other hand, has done so. From the Roman Empire to the Italian Renaissance, from the Protestant Reformation to geographical discoveries, it was the emergence of ideas that marked historical epochs. Thoughts that, as the Talmud teaches, become words. Which become actions, then habits, then character. Which become our destiny. Our thoughts describe what we will be. With these ambitious ideas Proger has taken its leap into hyperspace. Going from being the first Italian engineering company in terms of turnover, to being the first to invest in the soft power of culture and art, no longer separated from concrete executive design, hence the birth of a new division dedicated to Art & Culture. An idea that becomes action. A value system that becomes a project. An engineering company that becomes an instrument of the culture of the community in which it operates. We try to do this and say it without too much emphasis and without indulging in rhetoric, which is just around the corner, but it is what animated us in executing the idea of Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
He is the one who chose to make ideas into actions and transform his people, so strongly tied to traditions that our sensibilities do not share, into a country galloping towards a modernity of construction and beauty, through the discovery of the rights that are the heritage of the human nation. Proger has discovered the dimension of word that becomes action, of thought that becomes 'thing', to contribute at least a little, with humility and with determination, to the evolution of a people. Cicero said that 'brute force is the right of beasts'. The force of persuasion and sharing, of beauty and progress, on the other hand, is that of the women and men who come out of the cave.
* Marco Lombardi, CEO of Proger .
