Being John Bagnai (the Debate and the debates)
(… in front of the fireplace …)
This morning I woke up late, groggy, dizzy with an overwhelming feeling. With the progressive dissolution of the mists, the anguished awareness of this unpleasant impression became clearer: I heard a dull, continuous sound, so enveloping as to be imperceptible, as are certain background noises that you only perceive from the relief they give you when they finally stop, because you are so completely immersed in them that you filter them unconsciously. But even the effort to separate the signal from the noise, even though our body is a perfect machine and operates automatically, is a bit painful. Listening, I tried to understand where it was coming from, what its nature was… And suddenly I was struck by a disturbing, painful awareness: that deafeningly deafening sound was the chirping of crickets. In December? Has winter started (well) five days ago? But then… but then those who say that temperatures are rising are right (and of course they are!)!
After all, anyone who deals with wine knows it: the harvest season has progressively come forward, in Abruzzo it now begins in August, and I remember when we invited someone passing by to this a/symmetries conference who told us a couple of centuries of grape harvests in the Reno valley, how I remember my father's stories about when it snowed in Montepulciano every winter, how I read the war diaries of the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed at the Palena station eighty years ago, while today in Pizzoferrato, in my mountains, the temperature is in double digits…
So it's nothing strange that crickets chirp in December:
but since, unlike Science, science makes its own progress, it happens that para-dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane arrives under the kind of polite observation of the Black Knight :
Shot, hit and sunk. On the other hand, it wasn't exactly HMS Valiant!
To protect my reputation (because I want you to know that in reality the bad guy is Borghi: I'm the good one) I would like to point out, incidentally, that before razing you to the ground I always fire a warning shot. It's not even a matter of nature: it's simply that for twelve months of my life I had to organize guard shifts as a second lieutenant, and therefore I know how it works. I had pointed out that something didn't convince me, that it was going well but not very well, and that in order to have an effective capacity for involvement, as well as to provide those like me or Claudio who are at the front with non-wet cartridges, there was an operation to be done :
cite the fucking sources!
The constructive suggestion had not been taken up, and now I understand why: a common interest did not exist, could not exist, because with the nitrogen of anti-politics, with the orthopterans, we have already given here. They are suffocating Evil, period. Then everything else can and must be peacefully discussed with everyone else. But you cannot argue with those who have made the delegitimization of mediation and representation, that is, ultimately, political dialogue, their flag. If you are not interested in mediating, if the compromise is corruption, the dialectic is simplified: if you win, you burn me at the stake, but if I win (and the people, like it or not, are not so stupid as to make you win forever) …
We have yet to find the Bagnai of climatism, just as we have to find the Bagnai of vaccinism. Hilarious wannabes are circulating:
(I love it! Please, everyone follow it, and I seriously recommend: take a look at his website, the one mentioned by his Twitter profile, because it is interesting…), but in the end the problem is the one highlighted by an infiltrator to our conferences :
and it is a problem that I would really like to help you solve: I would like to help you be Bagnai, because there would be a great need for Bagnai on many other fronts, and moreover a/symmetrie also wanted to be a way to depersonalize the Debate, before other debates would begin to swarm, and create a Bagnai incubator.
Moreover, one of the greatest difficulties I found in trying to defend your freedom in the healthcare sector was precisely this: the lack of a healthcare Bagnai, that is, of a credible critical voice in the fascinating battle between hypochondriacs and conspiracy theorists (not I have to go into how and why few of the many voices available were credible, and we have seen the slip-ups to which one exposes oneself by not carefully selecting critical voices). This is a generalized difficulty: there is a terrible lack of third voices, not politically exposed, to be credible in the various debates. The others have plenty of it, and the problem cannot be trivialized to the "kittipaka" of grillina memory. It's not a problem of money, of venal involvement. It is a sociological, cultural problem, but it is also a problem of method.
Since "Bagnai wears out those who aren't", I'll tell you, from the inside, how to be Bagnai, so someone will wear out less, and maybe, calmly, the sides on the pitch will rebalance. The success of this experiment is due to three ingredients:
- competence;
- caution;
- patience.
We could talk about this for hours, but in the meantime I'll give you a summary:
- competence: speaking only about what you know;
- prudence: choosing the terrain of battle;
- patience: don't chase immediate consensus.
Competence, despite the poor quality of debates and interlocutors, is necessary, and competence is, first and foremost, talking about what you know. Take Borghi's famous tweet as an example: the fact is that no one (i.e. no one ) has been able to refute a single point of it. Evidently whoever wrote it knew what he was talking about, and equally evidently this helped.
Competence has another facet, which objectively helps in the debate, given that the mens piddina is particularly vulnerable to the principle of authority: having an academic role, or at least being able to find and use authoritative sources. Here I had an advantage: as a university professor with long experience of research on the mechanisms of crises in developing countries (those without monetary sovereignty and therefore exposed to the original sin , i.e. the need to finance themselves in foreign currency) it was not difficult for me orient myself in what was happening in a country that has to borrow in a currency it does not control, nor involve colleagues of a certain profile in my scientific initiatives. Even at this moment Twitter is full of idiots who try to belittle my academic profile: the fact is that it doesn't take much to demonstrate that those they consider "economists" are often technically not, and when they are they have a scientific production of quality and quantity lower than mine. Scopus and Scholar are there for that.
Having a minimum of academic standing and specific scientific experience in the subject I had chosen to expose myself to obviously helped. If journalists, even those who denigrate me and I have not yet sued, fear me, there is a reason: they know that I know more than them and that I know how to say it better than them. In any debate they will lose.
And chance has helped me up to this point: if I had gone to the Normale or graduated from Santa Cecilia I wouldn't understand a thing about what's happening. But then I started helping myself, in at least two ways.
First of all, from the beginning, I have always systematically made the sources of my data and arguments available to my readers, for three precise reasons: to avoid that certain positions could be classified as the ravings of a madman (the most that certain imbeciles could go so far as to say, as you will remember, it was: "Yes, okay, a Nobel Prize winner said this, but he didn't say it in a peer-reviewed article!" After which I also provided the peer-reviewed article review, and the dead imbecile…), allow you to challenge them (to understand which points were dialectically fragile or in any case more difficult to assimilate in the different arguments), and finally give you the opportunity to argue in a resistant way in your more or less public debates.
The sources, the fucking sources: without them there is no scientific discourse. Anyone who doesn't cite them doesn't understand that on social media there is an aG and a dG. In the 12 dG (which obviously means "after Goofynomics") those who speak ex cathedra without supporting their statements with data or scientific sources (as, after all, many information operators) may also get a like, but has a limited capacity for persuasion and involvement.
Then (and this is the second way I helped myself), I fiercely, fiercely stuck to the scope of my expertise. It was a tactical choice, rather than a professional one: I decided to choose the terrain of the conflict, both in terms of topics and in terms of platforms (and in fact the infrastructure of the Debate remains this). This choice, rigorous to the point of being emasculating, however served to consolidate my credibility, making me expendable. I repeat: it was a choice that in some circumstances proved to be short-sighted. I, as an economist, understood the euro. So, when at the beginning of this long story Stefano D'Andrea approached me to involve me in his criticism of the European Union, I was rather cold. I had no legal skills and it didn't seem appropriate to me either to open too broad a front, or to face an adversary against whom I was disarmed. Yet, Stefano was right: after thirteen years, of which five spent in Parliament, I can say that our country can survive (poorly) even the euro, but will always have enormous and growing difficulties within an awkwardly dysfunctional project like that European: just think of the infinite time that is wasted in monitoring what comes from Brussels and in taking part in the various sterile pantomimes that the fictitious participation of national Parliaments in the European legislative process requires. Stefano was right, but I wasn't wrong: by focusing on a single objective, the one most closely related to my professional skills, and avoiding the flattery of "famous party politics", I managed to obtain some results…
And then patience, which perhaps is only the consequence of disinterest, just as the impatience of others is the consequence of their ambition, of their pushing, of their offering. Achieving results takes time, especially if you operate in conditions of numerical and tactical inferiority, if in media debates you find yourself crushed on the defensive, on the "no" dimension (noeuro, novax, etc.). And reaction fouls must be avoided, because they are dialectically losers. And complaints are made, not announced: word of mouth instills greater fear in the world of worms than threats do.
And above all, adherence to the civil religion which I preach because I practice it: appostitism!
As I was traveling towards the fireplace I was thinking about why we are so short of expendable people, why we are unable to introduce people capable of arguing a different vision of the world to the programs that ask for them, and the answer I gave myself is because I have tried to share here with you today.
Example: you are a university professor of medical matters, you know how to communicate, you have a decent track record, you help me understand various things that don't add up in what is happening… but who makes you intervene on geopolitical or economic issues? I can also agree with what you say, but the theme is another: a credible speech, like a counterpoint, is built by adhering to constraints, in particular the constraints of one's own skills. By intervening in other people's matters you prevent me from involving you in your matter: but this falls into the category of things that if they could be understood would not need to be explained, this is true humility, this is true awareness that we are at war, distinct from the fatuous bellicose rhetoric of which everyone they puff out their cheeks also to free themselves from the annoying exercise of a minimum of real tactical intelligence.
Example: you are someone who has followed the path from the beginning, who has sat at my table, and I at yours, who has had the opportunity to appreciate my motivations and who is able to convincingly expose an alternative vision of the world. Now you would be valuable, in a position of independence, to go on the show to argue, but you ended up in the shattered of some little piece because you were in a hurry, because you didn't trust, because you don't know that my first law is "no man left behind"… It was worth the pain of not being in your place, as I have been for years and still am in mine, to condemn myself to irrelevance, to be made unable to do something after having shouted "do something" for years?
Here: let's say that if Bagnai wears out those who aren't, even being Bagnai can be exhausting for those who don't have a minimum of self-discipline and humility. Study, stay in your place, let the enemy get closer without revealing your position… Why can't what seems so obvious to me be achieved? I think the dynamics of social media are also part of it. Their use, combined with a lack of familiarity with numbers, I believe creates dangerous blunders. Our community has achieved great results (for example today it trended #borghidimettiti and #bagnaiarrogante!), but we must be aware of being a minority. How many times have I insisted on this point?
Well.
Positioning yourself is a difficult art. I tried to help you, but now they're waiting for me for dinner…
We will talk soon!
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/12/essere-john-bagnai-il-dibattito-e-i.html on Tue, 26 Dec 2023 19:08:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.