May 25, 2021 2:02 pm
The indignation is very popular these days. For many it has become a habitual participation tool. And it does not matter if you end up in a hurry to expire on brisk, contemptuous, classist tones, sometimes openly violent. After all, it is almost inevitable that this is the case: those who become indignant full-time have already proclaimed themselves morally elsewhere, overcoming any objection simply by floating on them.
It happens almost everywhere. For thirty years, television talk shows have provided the public with the spectacle of faces talking to each other, shouting, rolling their eyes, making verses without saying anything. The paper printed for as many years has led to a battle in which cheering and a disturbing moralizing aspiration have devoured the news. A large repertoire of indignations is staged on social networks that often takes on the tones of summary justice. We do not discuss everything but we are scandalized. It is done with the same words, the same tones, the same almost caricatured aggression. Everything blends into indistinct contours and nothing really seems important. Then we quickly move on to another topic without the words bearing any fruit. The public debate then appears to be a gigantic exercise in radical solipsism.
“We have to find the right words. Words are important ”, said Nanni Moretti in Palombella rossa. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that many make the care effort to choose them. Words betray the reasons but also the sufferings from which they arise. The full-time indignant denies it, believing that what doesn’t work is mostly in others. On the contrary, what the neighbor thinks does not matter. It is only interested in affirming oneself, thus reinforcing a radical identity retreat in which identity ceases to be also a social and ideal circumstance, and coincides more and more with the boundary of one’s own body.
Against others
This identity and individualistic drift took root in the 1990s. A decade in which, for many reasons, the idea that the questions of existence can be faced by socializing them or in any case also within a collective horizon begins to ruinly decline. To tell us about it there is, among other things, the vacuous and angry bipolarity in which we have been immersed since then.
In this condition, the identity of each one has been building more and more against the others and no longer together with the others. And in a country that has been reduced to being a set of individual-individualists who fight angrily to assert their identity against their neighbor without any more political, ideal and social mediation, indignation has become the answer most at hand, as well as the least demanding and risky since it does not imply the assumption of responsibility. This response has finally been restructured as a sanction that no longer has as its object the content of the speech of others but directly the identity of those in front of you, and therefore being done in a certain way. It seems the antechamber of something very disturbing, yet the reassuring and self-confirming rite of daily indignation has become one of the main forms of participation in public debate, and the same applies to that of counter-indignation.
Curiously, all this happens in the belief that in this permanent indignation, so focused on the self and unaware of the neighbor, there is also some form of criticism of the existing. In reality, when indignation exchanges its ideal capacity for a darkly moralistic attitude, it also loses all critical potential, especially when it ends up denying human imperfection at its root but also every possibility of redemption, as it would not even do. a judge or a priest.
And, then, usually it is those who tend to defend the state of things that are scandalized. Thus, all this daily indignation that animates the public debate remains an individual reflection turned on its own identity and its defense. It produces neither processing nor change. With its cops, it is placed, indeed, among individuals as a ferocious mechanism of dissuasion of all dissent and social self-control, as well as being a zealous manifestation of homologation. And in this way it ends up being a powerful engine of conservation or, perhaps, disguisedly reactionary.
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