UN General Assembly
2012

of peoples, the anthropological crisis of which I spoke has emerged, that is, a lack of conviction in the supreme dignity of every individual, even when they have just been conceived or are in a vegetative or terminal state. It is an illusion to want to create true harmony among peoples, to guarantee peaceful coexistence and real cooperation between States if we confine ourselves to a vision of mankind that — without in theory denying the importance of the dignity and fundamental rights of the individual — consigns the profound dimension of the person and his uniqueness to the rank of secondary factors, and insists on vague collective concepts that reduce the individual to the simple category of consumer or agent of production in the market. A human being is not a mere number in the masses of the global population. And the masses of the global population cannot be viewed coldly or with suspicion as a danger threatening the environmental and social balances. We are talking about men and women, each with dignity and rights. Ideological visions that