"There is the economic value system of business is business, there is art with its l’art pour l’art, architecture with its functionalism, there are military, technological and athletic value systems - each of them ‘unfettered’ in its autonomy, each resolved to push home with radical thoroughness the final conclusions of its logic and to break its own record. And woe to the others, if in this conflict of systems that precariously maintain an equilibrium, one should gain the preponderance and overtop all the rest, as the military system does in war, or as the economic system now is doing, a system to which even war is subordinate, - woe to the others!" The discussion is based upon the three closed systems analyzed by Hermann Broch in his novel The Sleepwalkers (1930-1932) and in his essay about Hofmannsthal (1947-1948). How can we consider the actuality of these autonomous systems? Is it positive to speak, as Broch does, about a " decay of all values," and what is, in fact, positive ? Should we be resigned to undergo a shattered world of Sachlichkeit (relevance, objectivity, impartiality, realism, matter-of-factness, functionalism), or should we approve the opinion of the Swedish sociologist and journalist Göran Rosenberg, who analyzes these paradoxes in such a way: "There is of course a perfectly normal state of mind between confusion and certainty, between despair and bliss, and that is - uncertainty, ambivalence, ambiguity. Which I think, happens to be the true human condition, at least more true than the long-lived Western fiction of a human march towards fulfillment and certainty. " [The Heritage of a Century, Helsinki Forum (2001)].
