Morandi Bridge? Mottarone? There is no development without security
The intervention of Francesco D'Arrigo, director of the Italian Institute for Strategic Studies
The first object of political action, since always, since the constitution of communities, societies, states, democratic institutions, is that relating to the production and management of the security of its citizens.
The development of a state can only occur if the security policy is able to reduce risks and prevent them from turning into dangers. If there are dangers, no one is interested in investing in new development hypotheses.
Anyone who has lived, in front of the TV, the day of 11 September 2001, bears engraved in the memory of the images that since that moment have become part of the history of humanity. Repeated endlessly on screens all over the world, there is no person today who could not recognize the silhouettes of the two giants of concrete and steel – the Twin Towers of New York – which curl up on themselves and disintegrate, one after the other. other, disappearing in a cloud of dust that envelops the whole island of Manhattan.
Now, let's imagine for a moment what the climate and the response of Italy would have been if the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa or the accident of the Stresa-Mottarone cable car had been caused by terrorist attacks.
I make this hypothesis because today it is the citizens themselves who demand, beyond the communication campaigns, higher levels of security and protection from risks and threats, because security is fragile and heterodirected: the communication generalizes a single statistically irrelevant case (a aeronautical accident, a thwarted attack, the undesirable effects of a vaccine, etc.) and projects it into the collective imagination of individual citizens, both to guide their behavior and because it is the way that communication has to regenerate itself (self-referentiality) .
When the danger is high but the alarm is low, people have a weak reaction, while when the danger is low but the alarm is high, they overreact. It is not the danger that creates the reaction, but the degree of alarm that determines the perception of the risk. In reality, the risks that we control – or think we control – are a much lesser source of alarm than the risks that are beyond our control, as well as those that we consider imminent compared to others that seem distant to us. Death from a terrorist attack or a train accident is mathematically much less likely than death from a heart attack or car accident, but death in a terrorist attack or in a collapsing bridge appears to us to be "terrible" and beyond our control. , while the heart attack appears to us only as a possible event, however distant and controllable.
In the Genoa and Stresa-Mottarone incidents, since it was not a blatantly terrorist act, the communication immediately took over the communication "human error", a definition that has now become part of the media language, evoking images of serious accidents that occurred by fate even when clearly 'inexperience and / or criminal behavior. Whenever an accident is not attributable to a terrorist act, the responsibility is automatically attributed to "human error", which becomes the only cause of the nefarious event, capable of inducing public opinion to discharge the responsibility for the disaster on a single person (or a few people) instead of the whole system.
We read in Galimberti's Dictionary of Psychology: "By Error we mean an action that involves a judgment or evaluation that contravenes the criterion recognized as valid in the field to which the judgment refers, or to the limits of applicability of the criterion itself".
The term threat, on the other hand, means a broader concept that requires careful examination and a balanced interpretation. According to the Great Dictionary of the Italian Language, a threat means the “presentation (made expressly, with words or gestures, or tacitly, through behavior) of a future and unjust evil, the implementation of which depends on the will of the one who foresees the evil; it can be an end in itself (that is, aiming only at causing suffering in the person threatened by the disturbance, concern, fear that is provoked in it), or and more often it can serve to coerce their will and thus make them have a behavior that otherwise it would not hold ".
Today the sources of social threats are many and the specificity of the issue in question, namely catastrophic accidents in the transport sector, leads us to examine, among many others, those threats that pertain to the so-called sectoral security, that is specifically applied to certain contexts. production complexes of strategic importance for the economic and social development of the country.
To this end, it is useful to highlight the difference not only lexical, but substantial, between threats originating outside national borders – exogenous (terrorism, hacking, hybrid warfare, military aggression), and those originating from causes within the national territory – endogenous (political-ideological causes, economic and financial factors, organized and / or widespread crime).
This approach allows us to focus in the best way on the difference that actually exists between a terrorist threat and a criminal (subversive) threat, considering that the media now increasingly use the expressions terrorist and terrorist to report attacks, attacks, actions carried out. at term by suicide perpetrators, strategies and tactics planned by rebel armies or restricted groups of men who act animated by religious or ideological beliefs. The difference between the two matrices is fundamental for understanding the type of threat. The term terrorist (i.e. the concept of terrorism) can be traced back to potential threats originating mainly outside national borders, while the subversive term can be related to threats represented by some phenomena, including economic-financial ones, which have internal roots, that is in the national territory.
Investigations into accidents become fundamental in order to be able to establish their genesis and responsibilities from a legal and criminal point of view, while from the point of view of safety and prevention it is essential to understand the factors that determine them, through an analysis methodology that relates the three major elements involved in the production of the chain of "errors" that cause an accident: the nature of the task and its environmental circumstances, the mechanisms that govern performance and the nature of individuals (Reason, 1990).
In each incident, the authorities are focused on the judicial aspects that develop in trials that last several years and whose purpose is to punish any perpetrators of crimes, but it is equally fundamental to understand as soon as possible what are the political factors. cultural that can allow us to prevent them, leaving the logic of case by case, focusing only on the "fait accompli" and thinking exclusively of legal action rather than the prevention of future accidents.
The understanding and minimization of risk in these cases no longer pass exclusively through geopolitical or judicial factors, but through organizational models and technological, economic, environmental, social and cultural factors.
In order to avoid the risks of arbitrariness, violations or the human factor that cause accidents, the principle of "Accountability" must be strengthened: the responsibility of those who manage and those responsible for carrying out security checks in all organizations, infrastructures , public assets, companies, etc.
The lack of security in a single structure that causes catastrophic phenomena such as those of Genoa and Stresa-Mottarone has a devastating impact not only on the territory where they occur but also on industries, workers, the intense relationship that is established through the presence of company in a geographical area, the alterations experienced by a community, regardless of objective factors and the level of wealth that that company ensures to the territory.
The meaning that a disastrous accident assumes in the international collective imagination, especially if it involves citizens of different nationalities, goes so far as to identify it as a symbol of alienation of values and environmental imbalances attributed to the entire country. Events of this gravity, in addition to the loss of human lives, cause inestimable damage to the image of Italy and to the excellence of Made in Italy, which in the era of social media and in a context of economic war like the current one, are transformed immediately in media boycott campaigns against our industries and products of all kinds (cultural, food, steel and / or technological, architectural, sports, clothing, etc.), with negative repercussions on the trade balance and collective well-being.
For many years our state and our institutions have been mired in the midst of an unexciting ford blocked by the backwardness of the bureaucratic structure; by an oppressive tax system; from a health system with enormous waste and which showed all its limits during the pandemic; from an ever-redefining education system; from an inefficient judicial system; from scarce investments in research and from an evident deficit of safety culture.
But without a culture of safety there is no development, indeed, indiscriminate and inadequately controlled growth can be dangerous and can threaten our quality of life.
A strong acceleration of growth, such as the one we hope also thanks to the PNRR , without a culture of national security can produce cognitive and ethical deficits that can contribute to spread fear and insecurity among Italian citizens, increase the infiltration of crime, accidents at work and drive away potential foreign investors and tourists. Growth and development without security can even be in opposition, as shown by the uncontrolled climatic changes and the hydrogeological and environmental crisis affecting our territory, with its unsolved problems of polluted habitats, lack of infrastructure and eco-sustainability, or rather, with its problems of explosion or implosion of public services that are no longer able to contain the excessive load they are subjected to.
Every effort should be aimed at avoiding accidents, protecting the lives and well-being of citizens-users while far from these objectives is the lack of economic and professional resources necessary to promote the culture of safety inside and outside the institutions. public bodies, companies and especially schools, because the lack of security represents a concrete threat to democracy.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ponte-morandi-mottarone-non-ce-sviluppo-senza-sicurezza/ on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:41:23 +0000.