We are one — Paulo Coelho's Blog

Today, we see signs of society reverting to this sense of ‘oneness’ – but rather spontaneously.

And the example of Greek (Athenian) democracy comes to mind because it showed how society is responsible for each individual and vice versa. But than an important change happened with the Punic wars at the beginning of the Roman empire.
And from the moment the Romans won the war, a new ‘society’ was born and Rome became the city that started ruling the world.
At that time, there were other cities that also had an incredibly rich culture, but they were never able to progress as Rome did.

What is my point? We started as individuals, responsible for who we are today (with our family being a microcosm of our responsibilities). But in society, we go beyond the family; we cannot control everything.
So we started off as being ‘one and everything’ at the same time — and I hope that we can move towards this again.

I started talking about this because people say the old society was based on the individual – but I disagree. I think that old society was based on the combination of the individual and the collective. There was a perfect communion.

via paulocoelhoblog.com