The perfect storm
Read here the first part of the article.
Why set up a pandemic of law that makes a long series of otherwise contained diseases pandemic? And why does such a dangerous idea gather the support of an important part of the population, especially at its top? And again, because a civilization that claims to be faithful to the method and results of science chooses to ignore the scientifically measurable (such as "lockdown" syndromes) and measured (such as the dubious usefulness of "lockdown" ) damages of its conduct, and in doing this does he even pretend to act according to the "dictates" of a science that says, imposes and prescribes? Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide a single answer to these questions, because today's contradiction amplifies and brings to a level (until now) never seen before a long series of conditions that had already acted on the exercise and representation of social life from before. It is new in intensity, but not in premises and ways. His critique should therefore be structured in the context of a broader critique of modern contradictions and paradoxes in their first secular and then ever more rapid development of the last few decades. It is a criticism that we can only deal with in a disorderly fashion here, offering points of analysis that converge from different levels to guess the distant roots of the phenomenon by examining its fruits.
In the aforementioned May article, I concentrated on the religious suggestions of an otherwise absurd self-holocaust with which contemporary civilization seems to want to propitiate its own resurrection by shaking off the disappointments, fears and unsolved problems of a spiritually exhausted and materially unsustainable model. Without entering the chapter in many ways obscure of its contents, the " great reset " promoted by the World Economic Forum alludes precisely to this wish of palingenesis, as well as the many prophecies of a post-Covid world where "nothing will be as before". As has already happened in the recent past – the "reset" by Beppe Grillo , the "scrapping" of Matteo Renzi , the more general rhetoric of "reforms" – these are clearly unbalanced programs, if not already in terms, at least certainly in fact towards the pars destruens , while the subsequent positive proposal remains vague and unspoken, however never encountered in the execution. The will to destroy betrays the frustration of an era that sees itself as a loser on the path of its own believed progress and thus dreams of overturning the table, to start over.
In a subsequent article I framed this yearning for demolition in the temptation of a neognostic thought typical of decadent epochs and destined to fix the eschatological horizon of every scientific, that is, human religion. The objective of exalting humanity and its products, of that "new humanism" which today holds bench from the lodges to the altars, leads to the burning acknowledgment of the human defect, of its physical and moral corruptibility and therefore in the disgust of its imperfect carnality. In today's health rhetoric that disgust is faithfully translated into the terror of the bodies that pile up, their dirty and deadly breath and their limbs to be enclosed, washed with alcoholic gels, trained and corrected with mass pharmacology. Social distancing, I wrote later , is a distancing of man from himself and from his own mortal carcass in order to aspire to the contamination of a soul that is no longer the anemos of the breathing and living body, but the dead intelligence and therefore immortal of "thinking" machines and their impalpable flows of data, which must therefore replace relationships, places and physical experiences by reproducing them in the sterile geometry of the " digital ".
Turning our gaze to the economic aspect, it is not necessary to go beyond Marxian theory to see in this destruction the expected culmination of an overproduction crisis and its catalyzing "patches": the opening of the commodity markets, of the labor of capital that has imposed downward competition (deflation) by curbing the demand side and therefore growth, and the injection of financial capital destined not to be repaid due to the slowdown in the real economy to which they themselves contributed by draining interest and demanding "conditionality" government bonds to guarantee loans. The closures, the failures and even the "lockdown" riots mimic the effects of a war in creating the rubble on which the capitalist carousel plans to restart with reconstruction – green or black , digital or analog, smart or dumb , I don't think it matters. to nobody. Until the next crisis.
Politically, there is a widespread belief that this latest emergency is also a method of government to justify a further verticalization of social relations by acting, in the name of danger, on the one hand on the rules of constitutional inspiration that promote the human development of the population, another by compressing the participation of citizens with the double weapon of repression and indigence. This aspect does not need to be demonstrated, having already found confirmation in the increasingly dense series of "emergencies" that mark the history of the last twenty years, each of which has contributed to flesh out the post-war social democratic buildings by snatching one or more passages from them. of material well-being, freedom, sovereignty, legal and employment protections. As for the political abuse that is made of it, the contagion curve or the Rt indices is perfectly interchangeable with that of the spread. In both cases and in every other (at least) from 2001 to today, the proposed "remedies" always tend to the same results of controlling, forcing and dismissing the population in exchange for a chimerical "security" greedy for new sacrifices.
Even from the rhetorical analysis nothing new emerges. The narrative of the last emergency reproduces almost the entire catalog of the expedients that I described on the occasion of three or four crises ago : the myth of radicality (the "great reset", the "new normal" etc.), of resistance to change , of childhood , authority , insufficiency , therapeutic pain , the fantastic counterfactual , the challenge , the blame etc. But not only. As yesterday's austerity economic policies invoked the naked "law of numbers" to denounce the monetary famine they themselves created, so today's health policies appeal to the biological laws of an infectious disease to impose a range of other diseases on a larger scale. . This short circuit, in which deliberate acts shield themselves from immutable "natural" dynamics external to themselves in order to artificially fulfill or magnify them, finds a clear application in this year's titles, where "Covid" and not the policies launched under his name, he would be responsible for the economic, employment and health crisis we are witnessing. The underlying fallacy is that of the absence of alternative (TINA), that is, of an alleged problem-solution identity in which the first already carries the second engraved in itself, excluding any doubt, any other option and, therefore, any margin of freedom.
The messages announcing the arrival of the new vaccines offer a paradoxical, but very instructive, confirmation of this logical elision and its practical implications. While doubts about the action, efficacy , opaque procedures and contraindications of these drugs once administered en mass remain to be resolved, the promotion machine has already made the "leap" by declaring that they will, hopefully, contribute to at least partially curb the viral pandemic, but in return they will heal without less the one induced by its "remedies". If vaccination will be the condition for reopening economic activities and allowing individuals to leave the house, travel and attend public places, then it is clear that the pandemic against which we want to immunize is above all that of the law, are the syndromes by "lockdown" imposed by the same hand that offers the antidote. Apart from the merit, we can see an extortionate government strategy that creates an unbearable condition for the governed to pour into the only open escape route or, in any case, exhausted by suffering, to accept it as inevitable.
***
There is no doubt that the current emergency is producing effects of unmatched gravity on the quality of social life. The compression of constitutional rights and the control devices imposed on an imprisoned, regimented citizenship, tracked like cattle, chased when it leaves the fence, isolated from its affections, frightened, subjected to artificial realities, mass treatment and health pedigrees meet all the requirements of the " zootechnical totalitarianism " of which Pier Paolo Dal Monte wrote. It is certainly a "goal" never reached and all the more amazing because it is poorly digested by an ever-increasing slice of subjects. So how is it possible that all this is happening before our eyes, and at this speed? As I have already written, I believe that it is not possible to answer without framing the phenomenon in the historical crescendo of the method that gave birth to it. The emergencies that have followed one another at an increasingly rapid pace in recent decades have accumulated their irreversible residues in culture and norms, each time weakening the brakes necessary to contain the effects of the following ones, and therefore multiplying their leverage. If, from danger to danger, the general population trained in a short time to accept today the unacceptable of the day before, special attention must be paid to the material executors of this demolition, who we will distinguish in the two ranks of the national political classes (a all levels) and officials (at all levels) employed in the sectors involved.
In the first case, it is painfully evident how all political forces converge with discipline in supporting the cause of the pandemic of law without differences of action, verbalization and even style, each drawing the same slogans from the same bag to impose, justify or announce. the same measures. Even a distracted glance at what is happening abroad reveals quite clearly that the matrix of these photocopied measures with imperceptible differences in every corner of the world is neither national nor local, nor can it therefore depend on the vote. The elected representatives act like expensive paper passers, commercial agents, waiters of a dish that they have to make the people gobble, spectators of a film that will tell the voters by pretending to be directors. While the most honest (few) are silent or alluding, the others (all) swear they can change the plot and thus feed the illusion of a dialectic that is reduced, in fact, to deciding which signature to put at the bottom of pre-printed decrees.
It is not difficult to recognize even in this pantomime the ripe fruit of a process of emptying national sovereignty prepared and invoked for some time, on the one hand by binding the expenditure of governments and administrations, and therefore also their decisions, to the requirements of balance and loans from large private groups, on the other hand by transferring more and more powers to continental and supranational agencies which decide, as Mario Monti wished, "protected from the electoral process". The dismissal of peoples and the conversion of their assemblies into administrators of political products packaged elsewhere also implies the need to squeeze the independence of the elected so that they never give in, not even by mistake, to the temptation to represent the voters. This further "internal bond" finds theoretical support in the Versaillian concept of "populism" which indicates in the frustration of the popular will a virtue of government, and practical in a process that starts from afar, from the now more than twenty-year abolition of the preferential vote , continues today with the reduction in the number of parliamentarians and sails towards the last station: the mandate constraint, which will make any exception even by law impossible.
Below, an even more perverse constraint acts on the executors-officials. The police forces, doctors and other health, work and community security officers have the task of physically inoculating the legal pandemic in the population. By limiting the observation to the productive sector, the interdiction and sanctioning actions make even more bitter a crisis in which companies were already paying due to the growing bureaucratic and fiscal constraints, the dumping of large industrial groups in an open market regime, credit crunches and the contraction in consumption. As a result, employment, which is already characterized by low employment rates, precarious contracts and insufficient wages, also suffers, especially among young people. In this context, those in charge of applying the emergency rules become cogs in a self-sustaining mechanism. On the one hand, the hatred towards them grows because they are "privileged" perpetrators of damage from which they are (momentarily) immune. On the other hand, those of them who live with discomfort the new duties and the rules that establish them find themselves chained by their own "privilege", that is, by the normality of receiving a salary to carry out a job, which however becomes anomalous in the surrounding employment desert and salary: the same that grows precisely by virtue of the fulfillment of those duties.
While the newspapers highlight excesses of zeal by poking the maximum conflict between sanctions and sanctioned, the many who would like to express or exercise a criticism must guard against falling into that same hell of unemployment, poverty and precariousness increasingly set on fire by the emergency devices. Until a few years ago, the opportunities for mobility and employment guaranteed by a thriving labor market and a habitat favorable to small and medium-sized enterprises invested workers with a bargaining power that resulted in strong trade union and legal protections and, cascade, in margins of independence inconceivable by current standards. The subsequent "two-speed" drying up of protections, the crisis of entrepreneurship and the often successful attempts to transmit these plagues to the public sector through corporateization, privatization and outsourcing have instead dug a deep ditch that makes it look like a reward what was undeserved until yesterday was a right for all (Const., art. 4). I believe that it is also within the framework of this involution that the progressive militarization of the civil service and its employees must be explained, now considered to be holders of an award that must be deserved with blind obedience and a discipline that is not only operational, but also intellectual.
So far the most extreme application of this enslavement device has hit, certainly not by chance, the medical profession, which today for the first time knows the risk that its representatives are banned from the profession for having expressed opinions that do not conform to the slogans of a project. policy excused by "scientific consensus". The radiation measures that have reached some doctors guilty of having raised doubts about a health treatment glorified by world power centers have been repeatedly denounced by some (unfortunately few) aware colleagues and also by myself , not only as abnormal and incompatible with the freedom preached by the code of conduct of the category, but even more so because they enter the scientific debate with a straight leg, intimidate the protagonists and in this way make it impossible to develop better knowledge.
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With this review I have tried to show how today's conditions, although never experienced in themselves, "draw conclusions" of other phenomena that have long since eroded the democratic and constitutional dam and now converge together to unleash the "perfect storm" to we are witnessing. The emergency as a system of government must be prepared by acting both on the perception of the public and on the political infrastructure, so that it can produce its effects without obstacles and without the wounded system being able to return to its initial equilibrium. Like all demolition processes, even today's one has embarked on the path of an acceleration that disorients its own protagonists. The announcements that follow one another at the top of politics and information confirm the will to act in an openly revolutionary way, that is, without worrying about the residual regulatory and cultural restraints or, above all, the resistance of the subjects. We run in disorder to the goal and we neglect the narrative accompaniment that now focuses on repetition rather than on the packaging of credible, coordinated and coherent messages. In this confusion, the public gets confused and questioned, points their feet, tries to fill the gaps in official communication and tends to reduce the reasons for their compliance with the fear of sanctions and reproof.
It is therefore also a moment of awakening. The foreboded or experienced enormities arouse in many the temptation of a critical and independent thought, of a diffidence for the first time of the masses which, however, often pays the limit of applying the exceptional motives of "madness" and " error". Since instead "figs are not harvested from thorns, nor grapes are harvested from a bramble" (Lk 6:44), the present difficulties offer the opportunity not only to testify to one's dissent by affirming the demodées reasons for reasoning, human dignity and of the inviolable moral law that would protect us from the animal captivity into which we are slipping, but also to question the myths that for years, in every sector of common life, brick by brick, have produced a society so dysfunctional that it can be kept together only with chains and blackmail.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/la-tempesta-perfetta on Wed, 02 Dec 2020 04:05:37 PST.