Fake problems, real solutions
For a problem can only be solved by a principle.
(GK Chesterton)
There is a widespread perception that politics today would be unable to offer solutions to "citizens' problems" because it is too far from "people". It is a perception that I too share but in which there is a risk, of believing that there really is an indistinct "asset of the country" and not instead an overlapping of interests and needs that are limited to each other, in some cases they are excluded. Otherwise, there would be no denying the possibility of a policy as a possible field choice among the many possible ones, of a more or less unbalanced balance between social forces according to different visions, beliefs and conditions.
The idea of considering the politician as the place for solving or alleviating "citizens" problems produces the conviction that his failures coincide with the failure of his solutions. But it's the opposite . Political elaboration differs fundamentally from the administration because it is called to formulate problems, not to solve them , that is, to establish a project to entrust to the execution of technicians. That project can be expressed implicitly by indicating precisely the problems that need to be solved in order to progressively implement it. The approach of declaring problems and not directly the underlying objectives has a pragmatic advantage: the former (e.g. low wages, unemployment, malnutrition, lack of services, etc.) are concrete and present, the latter (ad e.g. a dignified standard of living for all) are abstract and distant and must in any case be broken down into a problematic vision that provides stimuli for action.
The formulation of the problem also implies its placement within a network of causal relationships which, in turn, draws a certain vision of reality out of the many possible in the background. A dignified life for all can be a goal in itself or, in turn, a problem whose failure to fulfill a goal distances the goal of a conflict-free society, of an evangelical precept, of a safer world for the rich (cit. Hayek ) or other. The Aristotelian final cause can be placed at any height, up to the ultimate limit of the supernatural, of a freely modular logical chain that opens infinite spaces to dialectical elaboration. Each political proposal is therefore only an explicit or implicit hierarchy of problems to overcome and its success does not depend on the success of the solutions it proposes (always fallible, for the most varied reasons) but on the consensus that its problematization of reality, and therefore its priorities, and therefore its model of society, are among the recipients.
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Now, it may be the case that a proposal is aimed at solving problems that underlie an unacceptable project for those called to support it. In these situations, it is destined to fail or to resort to the only chance to save itself: that of concealing its ends by enunciating false problems . This would be helped by the already observed elusive properties of the problematic approach: on the one hand its referral to the objective without declaring it, on the other the infinite freedom of its dialectical and causal combinations. For example, the false "spread" problem – in itself the unit of measurement of a conventional system, possibly problematic – conceals the objective, unacceptable for the majority of citizens, of ensuring large profits for big speculators without risk or effort. By reducing the two dialectical terms one would even discover a semantic identity: avoiding the increase in the "spread" means precisely protecting those who speculate, and nothing else.
An unpopular, or worse, misleading policy is therefore not recognized by its false solutions, but by its false problems . It seems to me that today this requirement is satisfied beyond all doubt and beyond all decency. The contemporary political debate can be defined as a continuous jet production of false problems where no day goes by without adding new smoke to a curtain of "emergencies" to be put on the top of the agenda every time: from " hate " to racism , from patriarchy to sexism, from ius soli, Culturae, itinerandi, natandi of others to the "scarce mobility" of ours, from the evergreen baubau of fascism which returns to that – novelty of the chef – of communism, from public debt to public money that «does not there are ", from" corporate dwarfism "to" too much state ", from" financial illiteracy "to" functional "illiteracy, from missed receipts to lost births (but, immediately after, the apocalypse of" overpopulation "), from frontiers "to be cut down" to "anachronistic" duties, from too much cash in circulation to missed receipts to "perceived" corruption, from gay parenting to traffic lights, to toilets, to "gender equal" forms, from education erotic infants to chemotherapy for sexually undecided preadolescents, from the deficit of "scientific culture" to the "digital delay" that must be "bridged" by forcing everywhere the use of computers , from "fundamentalisms" to "nationalisms", from " conspiracy " to « Fake news », from carbon dioxide to the right to vote which must be reserved for graduates on even days, also extended to sixteen year olds in odd ones, from chicken pox to measles to other diseases that become global emergencies and exterminating plagues overnight , but only if preventable with a vaccine, from autoblùs to provinces to "useless entities" to the number of parliamentarians whose cut, they say , was expected for forty years (ie from here ).
In this cacophony of alarms, all carefully removed from the alarms that rise from the broader citizen base, different types of problems are confused: the falsely formulated problems (that is, to reformulate a real problem, to hide it), those falsely represented (which transform minority cases or controversial in universal matters, for false synecdoche ), forgeries (i.e. problems created and fed by those who report them) and forut court .
There is also a widespread perception that these and other false problems serve to paralyze political action and divert public attention from the failure to solve the real problems that afflict it. This perception can also be shared and invites us to investigate the ways and motives of the phenomenon.
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If it is not needed, it serves something else.
(IP)
Let's look at the red thread running through the short anthology of the examples cited. In all cases, the "problems" formulated by the rulers and their editorial branches more or less directly imply an inadequacy or fault of the governed : lazy, backward, fearful, selfish, irresponsible, imprudent, ignorant, treacherous, prevented, bigoted, violent, prodigal, privileged etc. touching all the strings of moral reprobation. As in a pyramid, the breadth of criticism widens towards the lower social strata and thins at the political and economic levels, until it disappears. This produces the effect of shielding not so much the responsibilities of the dominants as those of the projects to which they are inspired, charging their unfortunate effects to those who suffer them and thus justifying their reiteration and imposition without limits.
The second and most decisive element of interpretation is evident from the solutions offered. The latter, since the problems are false, can only be false, that is, useless and bankruptcy. If however the hypothesis is accepted that the publicly formulated criticalities serve to conceal objectives, and therefore other criticalities, unpresentable to the majority, the false solutions then become the faithful indicators of an implicit project with respect to which they are instead finally "true" and functional, restoring a logical and causal sense that seemed lost. More precisely, if the link between the declared problem and the objective desired by the majority is false, that between the solution offered and the (concealed) objective of the minority is instead perfectly true . The formulation of the false problem thus reveals itself to be a mere dialectic vehicle to leverage the will and needs, often dramatic, of those who must legitimize political action and thus ensure that a solution enslaved to a completely different need – normally indeed opposite to the original – enjoy the necessary consent to achieve it.
The scheme easily applies not only to all the examples mentioned above, but in practice to all the so-called democratic action of our years, now firmly attached to a double track where the increasingly absurd representations of the problems and solutions coram populo , hysterical and surreal, they accompany the score of a lucid and obstinate march against populum . As an exercise, let us examine some examples of crasis between the objectives of the majority and the disguised ones of the minority downstream of the causal subversion caused by the false dyad problem / solution.
Example n. 1:
| Goal (May) | Building a more tolerant and dialoguing society. |
| ↳ Problem | L ' "hatred." |
| ↳ Solution | Denounce and sanction "hate speech". |
| ↳ Goal (min) | Promote the hatred of citizens against those who deem hatred the dominant messages and policies, to create a society that does not tolerate criticism and censures dialogue. |
Example n. 2:
| Goal (May) | Ensure and improve the provision of public services to citizens. |
| ↳ Problem | Public debt. |
| ↳ Solution | Reduce public spending and / or increase taxes. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | In the short term, guarantee speculation rents at the expense of citizens' incomes and the provision of public services. In the medium to long term, to provide large capital holders with an extra-constitutional lever to impose political decisions in their own interest. |
Example n. 2 (variant):
| Goal (May) | Ensure and improve the provision of public services to citizens. |
| ↳ Problem | Tax evasion. |
| ↳ Solution | Discourage the use of cash. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | Forcing the use of paid banking services, reserving the right to defraud the tax authorities of large multinational operators by further strengthening their advantage, invoking governments and financial groups to control spending and money held by citizens, up to denying them the right to spend it . |
Example n. 3:
| Goal (May) | Provide correct information to citizens. |
| ↳ Problem | The "fake news" on the internet. |
| ↳ Solution | Censorship the "fake news" on the internet and sanction its authors. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | Imposing a monopoly on information and fake news. |
Example n. 4:
| Goal (May) | Protect public health and promote advances in medical science. |
| ↳ Problem | The diffusion of theories and therapies rejected by the "scientific community". |
| ↳ Solution | Imposing "official" treatments and punishing heterodox doctors. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | To deprive citizens of their freedom of choice and to bend public health and medical science to the interests of a few operators. |
Example n. 5:
| Goal (May) | Improve the conditions of the poorest populations in the world. |
| ↳ Problem | The racism". |
| ↳ Solution | «Open ports» to immigrants. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | Exploiting the world's poorest populations to satisfy economic and economic interests politicians . |
Example n. 6:
| Goal (May) | Improve the training of young people. |
| ↳ Problem | The discrepancy of the results Invalsi. |
| ↳ Solution | Introduce compulsory schooling from birth ( yes, it has been said ), because the higher Invalsi scores would be associated with students who attended kindergarten. |
| ↳ Goal (min) | Weaken the role of the family , inculcate state propaganda from early childhood. |
Etc.
Practicing in other applications, the reader will soon come across a discovery: that the merit of the problematic triggers raised from time to time is completely irrelevant. That is , merit is the false problem . If those triggers are always falsely related to the underlying objective, their examination then becomes frustrating and indeed functional to their legitimation (I translate: of the effectiveness of homeopathy or of any "anthropogenic climate change" we don't care , if their discussion on command serves to justify the tresche of who directs the choir). It is therefore necessary to get out of the game and denounce the method of translating the needs of millions of people into critical issues that accuse people themselves and induce them to trample on their own needs.
The method has no exceptions, I would say that it does not admit them. Because yes, it is true, there are rare cases in which democratic representatives have formulated a real problem in real terms, according to the expectations of those afflicted by it. That is, that they have "told the truth". But those rare cases, whether they are the result of electoral cynicism or sincere conviction, only confirm the rule because, not being able to lend themselves to the "alchemical" imposition of pro domo domini objectives, they end up sooner or later in the dump of forgotten, retracted ideas , dormant and disavowed as pranks of youth. In the best hypothesis they survive in hiding and turn into carbonate utopias to be denied in public and whispered to friends with a little shame, so as not to be expelled from a system in which truth is obscene, rationality is a vice .
This state of affairs, of a petocratic democracy that produces noises, makes confrontation unbreathable and uses its tools to subvert itself, cannot fail to alarm. It can certainly be debated whether, after all, democracy has ever been anything else and whether the progress for the masses which in some cases have accompanied history has been nothing but heterogeneity of ends, accidents of a short and fortunate era. But attacks so wildly vulgar to the principle of non-contradiction and therefore to reality, increasingly painstakingly veiled by the painful Prometheanism of "dreams", "challenges" and "visions", their systematic nature and their instrumentality to a "final solution" of a class on the others – or of a delusion on all – would not be sustainable under any imaginable form of government, if not perhaps the literary one of the Orwellian masterpiece. And in fact it seems to be in a fiction whose plots recover in the register of the tragicomic and horror what they lose in verisimilitude, But there is a measure also in the lie, after which the reaction will be all the more ruinous the more scorching the disappointment of those who believed it.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/problemi-falsi-soluzioni-vere on Thu, 17 Oct 2019 10:21:00 PDT.