A sad triumph
This article appeared in a slightly abridged version in La Verità on Wednesday 11/24/2021.
I learn that in South Tyrol, where a national preview of a "Corona pass" was already being tested last spring, much stricter rules will now apply to families who choose to train their children according to the principles of "parental" education. A citizen of the time who swears not to move his finger without the comfort of scientific "evidence", I searched in the considerable literature on the subject which serious cultural, emotional and social defects would be encountered by small homeschoolers . But I have not found anything like that, quite the contrary. On the other hand, in the same days, I read a barrage of photocopy-titles on "clandestine" schools in which " especially no mask families " would find refuge and which would be proliferating throughout the country, with the former Habsburg province in the lead.
How many children are there so barbarously " removed from our society "? At a guess, less than the articles in which it is mentioned. In the autonomous province where the phenomenon is most widespread, it would be 544 (five hundred and forty-four) children : 0.7% of the school population. But the deputy from Bolzano and Totiana Michaela Biancofiore has no doubts: it is a "boom" that "we are witnessing helpless", a proliferation of actions "that undermine culture, social cohesion, public order ( sic ) and health" . On what basis does he launch these accusations, what are the sources, the testimonies? He doesn't say it. The "cultural involution" of the pupils "withdrawn from socialization" is "evident" to her – and that is enough for us.
In another geological era of our feeling, we would have appreciated the irony of fining those who define "illegal immigrants" as people who enter our country illegally and instead accept that it is said of those who carry out an activity required by law , in compliance of the law. But today everything seems normal. It would also be legal to occupy the streets to express one's dissent, but since they do so, even the "no green passes" have become " increasingly toxic for our democracy, " explains a proudly anti-fascist senator.
Developments like these are worrying, but not surprising. Because the one between citizens and the government now seems to be an open game, a regulatory poaching that aims to find and close any escape route to push the herds in the desired direction. So it is easy for the hunted to guess that the new restrictions will strike precisely where a refuge of quiet resists, a plan B or C, a possible margin of existence in the last folds of previous civilization. They know that the next arrows will fall wherever there is a margin of life on the banks of the river, because the strategies on which they lose sleep are the same ones that take away sleep from their punishers, their hopes are the worry of those who pursue them. Cash that makes you work even if you are suspended from your salary? Home that makes you survive even if you can't pay the mortgage? Pension that makes you eat anyway ? Right to confidentiality that you can appeal to? We know, we know.
The metaphor dear to a television doctor comes true in the extreme, of a hunt for "mice" so frantic as to make it lawful to destroy any structure that offers them a ravine. There is no logic, there is no dialectic, there is no protection, there is no constitutionally or customarily ordered freedom that can stand in the way. Every escape must be demolished and only once they have been reduced to living in the rubble, naked and in the open, the hunters will perhaps wonder if it was worth it and if that desert was no more than a passage, the destination of those who offered it the pretext.
As someone remarked, not too jokingly, the "conspiracy theorists" get it all right these days. But it is an easy foresight, theirs, for which it is enough to imagine the end of a farce that has already been blasted from the very beginning. After almost eighty years of relative democracy, today it is difficult to digest the hypothesis of such a ruthless government towards its citizens, yet it is not uncommon for it to happen, for example it has been the case of many foreign dominations. Today's world, whose many governments carry out the dictates of a few supranational masters with one voice, could integrate the particular case of a global colonialism without a local colonizer.
Or more than particular, it could also be the last epiphany of a rule that has been around since the dawn of modernity, whose first political matrix is not the National Convention , the revolutionary theater where right and left quarreled over the seats as they marched united against the martyrs of the Vendée. That French forerunner of our democracies, on the other hand, was nothing more than the cosmetic dialectization of a more straightforward progenitor, of the enlightened despotism of the philosophes that the people can at best grant the bow of Volterra's paternalism: " tout pour le peuple, rien par le peuple ". In times of crisis, this genetic contradiction re-emerges as a disease that has never subsided, because it is incurable. Years ago I denounced the signs of its relapse into the spreading of the concept of "populism" which, having dismissed any paraphrase, crippled the sovereignty written in our Charter into a derogatory term from which to distance oneself. The rhetoric of the "reforms" has given substance to this meaning by understanding political intervention as a necessary frustration of the mandate, a pride in the "unpopular choices" and in drawing "tears and blood" from the people, of forcing them, re-educating them and punishing them, fulfilling in corpore plebis the metaphor of the virus that attacks everyone's life.
What we are witnessing of this geniture is the indisputable triumph at least in a quantitative sense, due to the worldwide reach of the "enlightened" method and its ambitions. Never as today, if not perhaps in the legendary times of the biblical tower , had the imposition of the same medicine and the same words on everyone, the suppression of every space, even physical, of otherness, been demolished with such an iron unanimity of purpose.
Yet, to be a triumph it is sad. Where are the fanfares and jubilation of every worthy regime? Where the propaganda trumpets sound, who magnifies the progressive fate, right now when they knock on the door? As the global army advances, crushing every obstacle, the darkness of a paralyzing twilight deepens. We live every day under the heel of some new threat and the only victories we can sing is that … it could have been worse. The conquered territories are not even looked at, only the small pieces of land not yet yoked count. The glass is always half empty, if only one drop is missing, so that it is never party time: the more you win and the more you fear the enemy, the more you crush it and the more you exalt the danger with anger.
Someone has evoked the gloomy tones of the Orwellian dystopia, whose omnipotent Party spent every effort to terrorize, monitor and confuse the population, also repressed their thoughts and trained them every day to hate an enemy. It is a model of domination in malo , that is, which focuses everything on the fear of the worst and the worst and which, not being able to offer anything, therefore only knows how to remove or threaten to remove. It is the meritocratic model in all its splendor , the one in which the deserving earn nothing but the promise not to end up (for now) in the underworld of the undeserving, the one whose "rewards" are nothing more than a postponement of punishment. If that model lives today in style and intentions, however, we need to ask ourselves how sustainable it is in non-literary reality and where it can end up, whether at a point of rest or rupture. Reading the events, in fact, it appears clear that resistances increase continuously as violence increases, and that these continually call violence, so that it is difficult to believe in the more or less peaceful settlement of a new system.
The first doubts about the solidity of the "1984 hypothesis" date back to the publication of the book. In a famous letter addressed to his younger colleague, Aldous Huxley recognized in the "sadism" of the rulers of Oceania the "logical conclusion" of a revolution which, starting with Robespierre and Babeuf, "aims at the total subversion of the psychology and physiology of the individual" , but he said he was skeptical that "the politics of the boot-that-treads-on-the-face can go on indefinitely." Rather, he believed that "in the next generation the masters of the world will find that childhood conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more effective governing tools than prison clubs, and that the hunger for power can be better satisfied by conditioning people to love life. their own slavery, than by whipping and kicking them to push them to obedience ».
For Huxley, the problem of the " consent of the ruled " could not be circumvented, the consent of the dominated which, he explained in a television interview in 1958 , will be ensured by the new propaganda techniques suggested by commercial advertising to "bypass the rational side of man and to appeal directly to his unconscious forces "in a way that is not directly violent. To make the subjects "happy under the new regime [or at least in situations in which they should not be", the contribution of new technical discoveries will be fundamental: on the one hand, the "technological devices that everyone wishes to use [and that] they can accelerate this process of subtracting freedom and imposing control ", on the other hand the" pharmacological revolution in progress … powerful substances capable of altering the mind with almost no physiological side effects ". Many of these strategies have become cornerstones of consensus management, from the ever-denser coding of educational programs aimed at children to the pounding and evocative yet poor reasoning style of government "awareness" campaigns, to the ubiquitous digital technologies that act. both as an anesthetic of sociability and as a panoptic tool for global surveillance. As far as we know, the clues of a large-scale psychochemical conditioning are lacking, although the repeated and universal medicalization apparatus on which we insist today with so much obsession would make such an intervention feasible for the first time, at least potentially . It is not useless to remember that in Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World , the ax of repression falls on dissidents precisely after their failed attempt to prevent the distribution of "soma", the state drug with which the world government kept subjugated and The citizens are "happy".
According to some commentators, the Huxlerian perspective does not replace that of the colleague, but integrates it, since the stick of repression must push more and more people towards the carrot of conditioning. Except that today the reverse happens: the carrot loses appeal and the stick hits harder and harder, the dissenting residue expands and the propaganda devices, however powerful, do not keep pace. The possible scenarios therefore seem to tend towards the crisis rather than normalization. But to what extent? An open persecution, a purge, a recession, a collapse, a "color" revolution or a war that offers the right to martial law? And how much the exasperation of the squares is a hitch, how much a cultivated pretext? We do not know. But even the idea that the "last revolution" may not be equipped with the tools refined up to now and that it must therefore demand a physical reset was not alien to Huxley, whose letter concluded with the admission that "in the meantime, of course, a large scale biological and nuclear war could break out, in which case we will have nightmares of another kind and difficult to imagine ».
A somewhat disconcerting conclusion, indeed, which disavows the inevitability of the process and confirms the suspicion that the great architects, the builders of progress far from God and men, can only sow rubble to triumph sadly and rejoice by foaming, and that their dreamed of building is precisely and only a destroying. In the end – but only in the end – it's good news.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/un-trionfo-triste on Sun, 28 Nov 2021 12:37:41 PST.