DEEP THOUGHT SERIES:

Our Silence Will Not Protect Us

A friendly conversation on stuff that matters
with Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Conversations / Sat 21st June / 3-5pm

We are a world away from a post-WWII consensus of collaboration, solidarity and care. Our moral poles have flipped entirely. Wherever we might find ourselves, we seem to have sleepwalked into a world underwritten by codes of venal self-interest. We all know this is not who we are as people. After all, we teach toddlers to share and care for others, yet we stay silent as some make sacks of gold from selling cigarettes to children and missiles to psychopaths. 

This winning mindset from which only a small number of humans profit holds us captive by feeding us the mockeries of separation - as Audre Lorde perfectly named them. The fiction that we face life alone, as individual units in an atomised multitude of difference, is profitable for those who want to sell us lipstick. For those who want our aspirations to seek no other channel than finding the right kind of sneakers – and certainly not to question a way of organising society that keeps private greed and callousness untouchable.

Things have gone too far already, enabled by our silence. Re-becoming a collective, a whole, a body of people who know right from wrong, requires a rewiring of our individualised selves, a re-coding of our ideas about what is real.

Come along so we can make a start, with honesty, laughter (yes) and a hopeful conversation.

Open to everyone | Booking required | Bar open

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ABOUT THE HOST

Andreea was 8 years old when totalitarian Communism collapsed overnight in her native Romania. She saw then how quickly yesterday’s absolute truth can become tomorrow reviled atrocity. She knows that societal narratives can shift fast, and when they do, they make deep system re-set possible.

For two decades she worked for international development, human rights, health and sustainability in the EU institutions and international NGOs. In 2019 she set up Flare, a Brussels-based think-and-do tank that experiments with practical ways of shifting the collective ideas we hold of what is normal and desirable. This work builds on 15 years of her researching and writing about societal narrative shifts. She is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader and a member of Global Diplomacy Lab.

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	WHEELCHAIR
Bar open with snacks	Small (10-20)	Available on request