There are moments in history when humanity acquires powers greater than wisdom.

We are living in such a moment. The concentration of wealth and power corrodes democracy from within, draining our institutions of their legitimacy and ordinary citizens of their sense of agency. 

Transformative technologies, uncharted, ungoverned, accelerating, godlike, are remaking our economies, our cultures, and our understanding of truth itself. At the very moment humanity faces its gravest existential risks – climate breakdown, nuclear re-armament, artificial intelligence, the threat of new pandemics – our capacity to act together is fracturing under the weight of geopolitical rivalry and horrific wars.

These are not separate storms. They share a common source: power left unguided by wisdom and unchecked by democratic accountability.

And history is unambiguous about where that leads. We gather near Olympia – our Symi Symposium – not to catalogue the dangers, but to ask what democratic societies can still do about them.

While there is still time. Yet these dilemmas are not entirely new. Long before the age of algorithms and nuclear weapons, the ancient Greeks reflected deeply on the nature of power, on how it rises, how it seduces, and how it can overwhelm those who fail to temper it with foresight, restraint, and a sense of the common good. Their stories endure not as distant myths, but as living reflections on the human condition, and on the responsibilities that accompany power.