An Unprecedented Leap

NEXT is an Unprecedented Leap into the Future of the Post-COVID World

BY GABRIELE GALATERI DI GENOLA — CHIARMAN OF ASSICURAZIONI GENERALI

The future that awaits us on the other side of the pandemic remains very much a terra incognita. This may seem at first glance to be a banal statement. After all, nobody is able to predict the future with any certainty, not even insurers, whose job is to forecast everything, especially the risks, to calculate their probability, assign them a value, and find solutions to mitigate them. And yet...

And yet human beings today have eyes everywhere: we can observe the Earth from space and turn our gazes out towards deep space, observing every change, every opportunity and every threat; we can see into the minuscule world of viruses and bacteria, into the depths of the abyss and the nothingness of the digital expanse; we can look into and through our bodies and admire our very building blocks, the atom and its subatomic particles. This astonishing observational capability, however, clashes with a tendency that places our very existence on earth at risk, as individuals and as a species: the inability to retreat from the vision of ourselves as the masters of the world around us, the challenge of tearing ourselves away from the here and now, from our immediate future, and to look beyond our own fleeting existence. This is the NEXT challenge, the one facing us now, an interrupted leap into the future. To prepare for it, we must once more recalibrate and place humanity first, but this time from another perspective: one that holds that humanity is no longer separate from its ecosystem, but that it is one with the planet it inhabits. I believe this is the launchpad for a new way to tackle the great challenges that stand in our paths. We must reverse the process of environmental destruction that we started with the industrial revolution, and find a balanced solution to climatic and demographic imbalances, putting our hopes and faith back in the hands of science and technology and the human capacity for reason. We have the ability to understand and the responsibility to intervene.

An interrupted leap into the future, from another perspective: humanity is no longer separate from its ecosystem

The financial sector can play a decisive role in this undertaking. But how can we be the difference? To offer a response to this question, I look back for a moment at our past, to the foundation of our company, and the two centuries of history since. In that time, we have overcome similarly epochal events. In 1831, Assicurazioni Generali gambled on NEXT, an “interrupted future” drawn from the new trade routes forming around the world, contributing to the birth of the modern age and laying the foundations for globalisation. There was goodness at the heart of this vision, offering a layer of protection to humanity as it went in search of knowledge, exploration and progress. That vision has brought us to where we find ourselves today, and now we are once more duty-bound to invest in the stage that follows, the NEXT, the green and digital revolutions, continuing to protect people, their inspirations and their future.

Happy reading.