Covid is the strongest experience of my entire long life. This observation of which banality I am aware of. But I believe these are also some of the strongest experiences that humanity has faced in the last two centuries. Because he is facing it with a wrong belief of awareness. In fact, the extraordinary scientific, technological, medical advances, and in any case in terms of knowledge of diseases and their genesis, have determined an illusion of invincibility. Science can overcome anything, so in the end, it will win. Exact proposition, subject to verifying the time of its implementation.
But above all the conviction of the superiority of science has not reckoned with its having to immerse itself in the multimedia loquacity that distinguishes our life today. For this reason, science, which is such if it verifies its own steps and results through the confrontation within its community, rational and prolonged, is forced to deal with unscientific opinions. Also for the vanity of its exponents. Then it happens that a scientific hypothesis becomes a political position. And then you begin to move and navigate in the terrain where there is no superiority based on the quality of reasoning. There is parity. Opinions are all the same as they refer to the equality of citizens in the face of the right to express their thoughts.
Scientific opinion today is not as distinct as it should be from opinions tout court, so in the end, going further and further down the level, it behaves like sports opinion. And it would be nothing. Because sports opinion can be very serious. It is confused with faith. This fact which is then determining the behaviors, the choices, of every kind and quality in the unawareness of the framework in which it moves and which it can determine. I mean, more cautiously, that the absolute irresponsibility of the positions expressed is widespread due to the lack of awareness of the real framework in which they are placed.
Then, two or three deaths certainly linked to a vaccination, become for some the demonstration of the danger of the drug and of the vaccination operation. An opinion that without any demonstration conquers the same dignity that it would have if it were based on a demonstration and is therefore legitimately opposed to the doubt of those who say, let me first understand. He wins because he is faster. It wins because the speed of a public representation prevails over its quality, its ontology, its genesis.
All quite normal. Moving on to other experiences, these days there is a great American financial event in which there has been the novelty of a market movement, that is the sum of investments conducted on the basis of an opinion of political and cultural goodness, therefore of a sociological quality without any evaluation. economic financial. The beauty is that real financial entrepreneurs have emerged who have used the same mass thrusts on the fly, chasing the money movement and structuring real financial movements on them.
These facts show the possible emergence of the worst, that is, of behavior disconnected from any effective evaluation of the common interest, of a social justification, but guided by the simple, wild, affirmation of pursuit of personal profit. It is a form of loss of sociability.
I mean that when you get used to not physically seeing your fellow man, but, in fact, to consider him a vehicle of infection therefore to be avoided at least in close contact, when communication is required within the limits of technology excluding what technology it should help and facilitate, not replace, that is, the play of eyes, hands, words experienced by presence, communication itself changes. It is no longer communication between two cohabitants within the same shared world. It is communication between two entities with conflicting survival rights. It is essentially defensive communication. Selfish, if any, aggressive.
The risk of the pandemic is that it can bring out the worst, isolation, and that it can convince us of the fact that it is normal life and that even in the future, defending ourselves from disease will have to consist of lower degrees of sociality and abolition of physicality. It is not difficult to imagine that smaller and smaller social groups can be formed and increasingly stronger economically, more and more endowed with the possibility of defending themselves from the current virus and hypothesized by influential publications as a periodical constant of our future, better than others, and therefore capable to create environments in which to live in an exclusive way a sociality, even if reduced in its quantity, but effective. Abandoning others to an existence in defense. This will depend on the availability of finance, life goods and legal, economic and cultural instruments, in order to use them in the most conservative way. The risk, in short, is that the pandemic teaches us to take refuge entirely within small islands of power and health, whose only policy would be that of preserving the relationship of strength conquered.
There is a lot of talk in these days about political changes induced by the pandemic and the very strong social conflict. Observe the difference between those who, guaranteed by a salary that continued to arrive automatically on the bank account, sang on the balconies while the bar more or less abusive, while the little factory from more or less legal, while the laboriously correct activities, saw a reduction its margins of economic sustainability at absolutely ridiculous levels, never seen in decades, have been very heavy. He portrayed in a plastic way the lack of awareness of the big picture. Irresponsibility, while we need responsibility above all. That is, constant awareness of the interactions that must exist for a democracy to be such.
At this moment I see only the very unpleasant story of the race to affirm one’s belonging to a category of essential workers and therefore to be privileged in the choice of the vaccine. I have always wondered in these terrible days what could be, apart from the ward doctors, more essential than the work of the policeman, since it seems difficult to imagine an arrest with a mask and distancing, and also that of the supermarket clerk, forced to the rhythms automatic calls to the single cashier of an ever faster audience, more and more charged with the terror of running out of mineral water. Instead I seem to understand that in Italy there is not a single category, social or working, that does not loudly claim to be essential. Despite the lesson of civility and elegance given by President Mattarella. Here it seems to me that all these evidences demonstrate the danger. And the need for political attention, including imperial ones, to avoid these drifts.