On November 9 next year we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of a milestone. I remember well where the fall of the Berlin Wall found me: in Zaragoza, in a congress on the history of the University under Franco's regime. The organizers, professors with years of experience and Marxist affinities, hardly commented anything about it. We, the young doctoral students of the time, were astonished at the end of an era, full of questions about the future.

No one had prepared us for that. "The world is moving towards socialism", was the slogan that could sum up the common doctrine among our teachers. And suddenly this: in Poland the socialist regime had collapsed, in Hungary too, Czechoslovakia was following the same path and the GDR, the jewel in the Soviet crown in the center of Europe, recognized that the barrier built to keep out its? citizens? The symbol of the Iron Curtain had melted, what would come next? Only the Soviet ambassador in Berlin foresaw it with foresight: without the Wall, communist East Germany was over and gone! Within a year. And then came, in cascade, a sort of acceleration of history that allowed us to witness the end of the Cold War and the USSR. That very solid power... no, sorry, superpower, evaporated. Definitely, we should seriously distrust those who used to anticipate the future.

That is why I particularly liked the fact that the man who was then in charge of NATO's military apparatus, when he retired shortly afterwards, confessed that after living through what he had experienced, he had become convinced that we should be prepared for the unexpected, because what we manage to foresee almost never happens. Such a recognition of the power of human freedom in the face of the prognosis of the expert or the powerful encourages me whenever I recall it.

The fall of the Wall made it possible to distrust the deterministic pretensions of rationalism, its derivative ideologies and all its apparatus of mass manipulation. Everything was more complex than these simplifications. Reality had within it something more resistant than the dominant ideas, it was capable of surviving propaganda, even the best-worked propaganda in the world, Soviet propaganda. That was worthy of astonishment.

A man who had lived under the boot of the Nazis and Communists, Karol Woijtila, who became Pope John Paul II, asserted that the core topic of human history was in culture, and that no lasting culture could be built without resting on truth. His thesis was that Nazis and Communists had fallen because they tried to build a world based on lies. What a bold thesis of this Pole! Can the humble truth, usually hidden by our frequent lies, by our self-interested "half-truths", finally triumph? It often seemed to me too optimistic. But there were a few reasons to heed his proposal, and as I learn more of the story it seems more plausible to me. Moreover, only by taking this daring thesis seriously is it possible to go ahead with the university task, to dare to know, without fear, certain that something better can be extracted from a more finished knowledge of our past, of reality in general.

So the opening of the Berlin Wall, over the years, came to convince me that the power of the lie, no matter how much cement, steel, barbed wire and, above all, domination of public opinion it achieves, has no future. And since today lies still have a lot of power (there was not only deception on the other side of the Iron Curtain), I like to think that we must be prepared for the unexpected.