Tremble, tremble, the witches are back!
…but we can't burn them: we would produce CO 2 .
“So everything has changed!” the naïve reader will exclaim.
"No, so nothing has changed…", the shrewd reader will conclude bitterly.
I would tend to espouse the latter thesis: the atmosphere of collective hysteria that surrounds us is decidedly witch-hunting. Yet, thinking about it better, I have to conclude that this is not the case either. Since the good old days of Malleus maleficarum something has changed, something very important: we have learned to wash our hands.
"Thanks to science!", the piddino reader will say.
No.
Despite the science.
Because Semmelweis today would be De Donno, and Virchow any Burioni.
So essentially nothing changes, and yet, miraculously, imperceptibly, episodically something changes, often for the better (assuming the aim of the game is to live longer). On this fragile and precarious balance the granite certainties of both are based, unaware of the fact that it could be worse.
"But how?" the boomer reader will say: " If it's already raining! "
Well the worst never died …
(… did you notice? Those who "science is not democratic" are also those who "you have to shut up, this is necessarily true because 99% of scientists say it!" So science is not democratic, but it decides majority, which is why Galileo or Semmelweis and so many others were wrong in their time. The reductio ad Hitlerum could not be applied to them, but only due to lack of raw material. After all, if Copernicus waited to be on the bed to express himself of death, evidently he understood what many of you don't want to understand… )
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/2023/05/tremate-tremate-le-streghe-son-tornate.html on Sat, 20 May 2023 20:42:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.