By Marion MARDODAJ
In one way or another, every human being carries a certain illness. It is not only a biological weakness or a clinical disorder, but an existential condition: the inevitable difficulty of the individual in fully reconciling with the environment around them.
Every era, in fact, establishes its own criteria of health and illness, of normality and abnormality. A man born in the year 1000 had to face the sword, hunger, and physical survival; those unable to adapt to that world were seen as fragile, sick, or useless. On the contrary, someone born in 2020 must face a completely different context, where the ability to adapt to technology, the speed of information, and social complexity becomes the new form of survival. Those unable to master these tools are labeled, if not as “sick,” at least as “inadequate.”
In a certain sense, then, every human being is sick, but the nature of their illness depends on the time and place in which they live. Illness is never absolute, but relative: it is the inevitable gap between who we are and what our context demands from us.
Leaders represent the most extreme point of this paradox. Those who are perceived as guides often harbor the deepest illnesses: illusions that very rarely turn into visions, yet the human and material catastrophes these leaders cause are, in most cases, ignored with “excuses” or forgotten; hysterias elevated into collective ideals manipulated in extremis. And yet, the crowd never fails to applaud, especially when that illusion finally seems to take the shape of a concrete promise. Thus, the inner ailments of a single leader end up becoming universal ailments—wars and conflicts that weigh upon entire populations.
Perhaps precisely for this reason, academic research should question more seriously the connection between hysteria and leadership. Not as a marginal curiosity, but as a fundamental key to understanding the dynamics of power and history. Hysteria is not only a psychic disorder, but a force capable of moving entire masses, leading peoples toward progress or plunging them into the abyss.
If humanity manages to recognize this universal fragility, it may finally begin to transform illness into awareness, weakness into creative adaptation. Only then will we be ready to unite our forces not to destroy each other, but to go beyond the boundaries of our planet, exploring together space and its mysteries.
From this perspective, Albania and Albanians must also have a place in humanity’s cosmic journey. Its history of resistance and freedom shows how even the smallest nations have contributed, through their struggles and sacrifices, to the building of universal values. It is not a matter of geographical or numerical size, but of moral legacy: a contribution that must not be absent when mankind is called to carry its fragilities and hopes beyond Earth.