ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors analyse and diagnose severe disorders that are haunting contemporary society. The authors have done so by providing a general framework of understanding, and then moved on to analysing three specific ills that affects human beings across the generational scale, from young people, through adults to seniors. They mention a wide variety of critical aspects of their contemporary civilization that seems to support the emergence of these social pathologies. One of them is pleonexia. The authors envisage a multidimensional and multidisciplinary programme that sets out to confront the social pathologies of contemporary civilization from various sources of inspiration. The circulation of social pathogenic 'currents' and salutogenic 'rivers of life' brings us immediately into conversation with Giambattista Vico's philosophy of history as ricorso, presented in Scienza Nuova as an interpretation of the rise and fall of ancient civilizations as recorded in mythology and poetics.
