How will the human being overcome its shadow? Perhaps by fleeing it? Perhaps by fighting it incoherently? If the engine of history is the rebellion against death, rebel now against frustration and vengeance.

(Silo 1981)

 When Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "...that man be redeemed from vengeance - this is for me the bridge to the supreme hope and a rainbow after long storms..." he was outlining for humanity the foundations of a utopian landscape.

Nietzsche was perhaps the first to problematically raise the issue of resentment in history. A resentment that has manifested itself in wars and mass killings and that still continues to permeate every field of human experience. Resentment is an underlying climate that finds its root, dehumanizing and violent, in the system of values, beliefs and aspirations in which we have been forced to live. Resentment always seeks the guilty and often finds it in those human groups that for some reason represent the different, the other.

A senseless catharsis occurs in which violence expresses itself in all its disintegrating force. In this scenario, revenge as a response to injustice finds more and more space. It is appropriate to investigate the roots of this behavior to understand the possible ways out. In this crisis of the human species, in which even the demand for freedom, peace and social justice is impregnated with resentment, a new sensitivity emerges, still timidly but full of hope, in the search for innovative answers to the current system.

Is this perhaps a utopia in motion? What does it mean in practice to overcome vengeance and resentment? How does this hope translate into the different fields of social experience, from justice to education, from international law to the everyday life of social relations?

Today, as never before in history, a conscious step towards sincere reconciliation has become urgent. A courageous act of personal and social transformation is needed.

We therefore invite you to the International Symposium of the World Centre for Humanist Studies in Attigliano (TR), to give your contribution of ideas and reflections for the construction of a future
without revenge.