The mouse farm
Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth
it only succeeds in making it a hell –
that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
(K. Popper)
***
There is only one word to describe what is happening these days: nastiness. A wave of malice that has risen since the time of medical confinement and today bursts out against those who, refusing to receive an injection in the arm, break the continuity of a command that does not tolerate circumstances, identities, thoughts. Never had such ferocity been known, never as now does it seem to accompany us "that eyeless being sitting at the table in front [who] had drunk it with the enthusiasm of a fanatic and would have chased, denounced and vaporized like a fury anyone who had »Questioned regime arithmetic (G. Orwell, 1984). Only in the last few hours a famous professor of medicine hailed the idea "that without the green pass you are closed at home like mice ", an equally famous veterinarian proposed to make the "no vax" (who are no longer the critics) pay vaccinations, but anyone who expresses doubts about a particular vaccine, for any reason) hospitalization in public hospitals , a radio host suggested that the deliverymen spit in the food intended for the unvaccinated, the former president of Consob to increase their taxes of the 5% , the general manager of Confindustria to deprive them of work and salary . On social networks, some health workers talk about concentration camps, gas chambers and other methods of torture and physical suppression of reluctants. It is a race to the massacre, a volcano of ideas to make the life of others – of those who dare to be other – into hell.
Why so much wickedness? First of all because it is an institutional malice, that is, which does not feed itself and which would rather die within a few days if the custodians of decency and social peace did not blow on its fire. The big news media forge the target: whoever slips away must be given the "hunt" as well as escaped or beasts, he is a handicapped person to be placed under guardianship or even a "coward" and a "deserter" who, casually explains another professor, " in his time he was shot on the spot ." In America, "the patience of those who have been vaccinated is over," admonishes a newspaper . Having traced the furrow, the authorities slip into it and review it first with words and then with deeds. According to our Prime Minister, whoever does not get vaccinated gets sick and dies and, when he gets sick, he causes others to die . But if, on the other hand, those who get vaccinated do not die, then how can they die because of those who do not? And if in the months of maximum diffusion of prophylaxis that dying remained numerically identical to last year , when vaccines did not even exist, isn't the message being simplified a little too much? Wouldn't it be more prudent to dispel the doubts expressed in Italy and abroad before feeding tens of millions of people to suspicion of manslaughter?
These statements were accompanied by the introduction of a form of apartheid foreign to our legal system and our culture, the last stage of a path inaugurated with the experiment of the Lorenzin decree, of subordinating the enjoyment of certain rights to the reception of a drug, later updated with the suspension from work and income of some workers resistant to the potion. Eager to chase away the mice from the common home, the citizens accepted, indeed demanded the demolition of this or that trunk of the constitutional building erected on the corpses of the ancestors, made unaware in their ferocity that its beams do not house the dens of the feared rodents, but they support the life and dignity of all. Do not pay to decimate the already scarce and overburdened health personnel on which they depend for treatment, they greet the holocaust of a long series of economic activities that give prosperity and work, civil and criminal safe conduct for the benefit of a few "more equal than others", out-of-court imprisonment, electronic filing à la chinoise , censorship, discrimination, bullying, academic purge , liquidation of the right to privacy or, for the most hasty, the " rule of law ". It is too easy to predict that even those who admire it today with bloodshot eyes will burn in this fire.
Politically, such huge decisions emanate from a single party piled up in the government as they have not seen since 1924. Talking about representative democracy when all political forces declare war on a third of the population is fourth world stuff, a joke that doesn't even make you smile. . This uniformity has produced in the remaining two thirds the illusion that the goal transcends ideological flags and that the mice do not even deserve to express themselves in legislative assemblies. Hence the idea, as unpredictable as Christmas in December, of excluding them also from the active and passive electorate. Another unpublished one can be glimpsed, that of the caste society in which millions of paraiyars roam invisible and voiceless. With an important difference, however, that in our local declination the rights of genealogy are not valid but the conduct and thoughts. The status of untouchable can thus extend to anyone and at any time, according to the canon set from time to time by those who take the parliamentary holograms. The ghetto of the future has no walls, but movable walls.
***
Many are wondering in these hours how it is possible that all this happens in a republic that is said to have risen from the ashes of totalitarianism, whose young people commemorate the persecutions of the past by repeating "never again" and are indignant by rereading the Manzonian chronicles of the hunt for the aunt . May this stream of hatred cross the same country where special commissions against hatred are set up , may these discriminations become law while respect for all diversity and minority is required, may the grossest simplifications be expressed in the name of science and more unrepeatable insults come from the lips of those who preach political correctness. To understand these contradictions, it is necessary to understand the thought that gave birth to them, that modernity of which the West today is the most ramshackle and caricatured sample, and to apply its two fundamental cornerstones to chance: progressivism and secularism.
For the progressive, history is an irreversible succession of overcoming where the worst has always passed, the best is to come. In the mistakes made by previous generations he does not seek lessons, but confirmations of his own superiority, of what he has been able to leave behind. Those errors are like the darkness that prepares the light, the antecedents of a story with a happy ending that must be defended not from the risk (impossible, in the introduction) that they will be repeated, but from attempts to question their narrative function. It is no longer a question of facts, but of founding myths that must be crystallized in their iconicity, all whole and without the nuances and distinctions that would restore them to reality, and therefore also to today. To reject them it is enough then to reject their icons: religions of wars of religion, but not wars ; races are racial persecutions, but not persecutions ; nations, but not regimes , of nationalistic regimes ; of sexual discrimination biological sexual identity, but not discrimination ; of totalitarianism those who buy grappa in Predappio, but not those who renew certain methods of its most famous citizen.
This symbolism taken to the extreme, in which historical adjectives become substance and nouns are eclipsed, is in turn one of the by-products of the secular "creed". By rejecting Heaven, the moderns have also given to Caesar what is of Heaven and poured into the creations of men their need for a connection that transcends the finitude of creatures. This effort so evidently absurd and paradoxical, in which the Apostle saw a punishment inflicted on the wicked (Rom 1:25), disfigures not only the divinity but also the idols that should replace it because it engulfs them in an absolute dimension alien to itself and it thus makes it impossible to evolve. It is difficult not to observe how the thaumaturgical act with which today the distinction between persecutors and persecuted is marked is experienced as a lay sacrament that purifies and opens the doors of the huius mundi . The virus is a diabolical tempter that strikes unbelievers and revelers, science that until yesterday recommended doubt a handful of certainties to "believe" in, scientists preachers of good morals, holy doctors, martyrs or heroes, journalists and freezers . Lacking a perspective beyond death, biological life usurps eternal life and survival coincides with the salvation of the soul. The precepts of those who govern are the commandments that fill the orphan need for an ethics beyond the world, so that those who criticize them are not the enemy of order, but of the good. In short, the secularist ritualizes everything, he understands everything as a reference to the timeless and uncompromising values of which he has deprived himself. It is therefore not surprising that he reacts with anger to every attempt to return his symbols to uncertainty and complexity: it is the anger of those who see themselves deprived of meaning.
Once the horizon of transcendence in immanence has been set, everything is played out here and now, there is no elsewhere where the accounts will be made. The secular and progressive belief of being able to create "heaven on earth" (Christopher Lasch) produces by symmetry the need to prepare hell for those who take off from the glorious march. For them there is no severe enough punishment, they must be suppressed possibly by suffering in order to set an example and clear away the imagined away of magnificent destinies forever. This anticipated eschatology is the premise of all the exterminations perpetrated in the name of progress. In the Gospel of Matthew she is depicted by the temptation of foolish servants to uproot the weeds before the harvest, thus ruining the harvest, the good plants with the bad plants, and to make a desert where we are all mice. Without distinction.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/la-fattoria-dei-sorci on Fri, 06 Aug 2021 04:36:37 PDT.