This Fireside Conversation is with Swiss author, journalist, and communications specialist, Giuseppe Gracia. He explains how both faith and reason are required for building a healthy society, what the core issues of woke ideology are, and why “freedom” has nothing to do with having options.

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Giuseppe’s career has formed around being a PR consultant, and a crisis communications specialist. He served a long tenure as a spokesman for a Catholic diocese, which helped forming his strong beliefs in Christian and classical liberal values and their importance for society.

In this Conversation, he explains how faith - as in Judeo-Christian values - and reason are ‘like a perfect couple’. They balance each other out and lie at the core of Western societies and human rights.

Giuseppe therefore cautions not to hastily replace Christianity with ‘new religions’, such as woke ideology or the climate panic that in his view are deeply cynical and anti-human if examined in depth. From his perspective, the woke ideology fundamentally mischaracterizes human concepts like love or freedom, leading young people to chase ideals that will not bring them the fulfillment they are looking for.

The reason these ideas find so much popularity within younger generations, Giuseppe explains, is that they directly speak to our core instincts of tribalism and safety seeking that are still deeply seated in adolescents. Hence the classical liberal narrative that calls us to grow out of these admittedly comfortable instincts is harder to ‘sell’.

Ultimately, Giuseppe says, it comes down to all of us individually being ‘needed’ instead of ‘needy’, to actively tackle our problems, work hard and make this world better.