Revisiting Authenticity in Post-Truth Era: Building Skills as Social Infrastructure for European Resilience

This paper outlines an emerging productive tension in the EU education-policy space as it adapts to the pervasiveness of AI and the coming of AGI. One possible reaction could be the acceleration of the narcissistic, egocentric, and alienating ultra-hedonism of spectacular consumerism; the other reaction could be, conversely, a renewed engagement with Stoicism and moderation, emerging in response to the ecological crisis and the resource crisis intensified by the entropic sequence of conflicts associated with the Trump 2.0 regime and its effects on EU-policy conjunctures. In any case, the deeper philosophical grounding has remained, at least in appearance, unchanged: the persistence of what Gianni Vattimo diagnosed as ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), operating in the long aftermath of the Nietzschean ‘death of God’ thesis. This process of disenchantment and desacralisation to date has not produced greater individual or societal resilience; rather, it has generated new and more intractable forms of ideological, geo-economic, and cultural conflict. Only a ‘strong-thought’ post-Leonardo style EU educational project can provide a sustainable path out of this morass, as premised in Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitas” Encyclical (addressing the intersection of AI technology and human dignity).