A final
comment

Hypothesizing the future that awaits us is like entering a dark room for the first time. You cannot know if you will find objects scattered to stumble your steps, because you know nothing about that room. You don’t know the dimensions, you don’t know if you will bang your head somewhere or if the floor will give way to a sudden chasm. You don’t even know if someone else is present in that room, like you intimidated or otherwise hostile and determined. If there are animals or insects, traps, dead ends or unexpected aids.

You can only take one thing for sure. To get out you will have to explore: move, appeal to your previous knowledge, common sense and analytical ability. You will begin to feel the floor, measure the width of each side in steps, proceed along the walls remembering any imperfections of the plaster. You will choose better strategies than others based on experience and risk appetite. You will use what you have read, seen and thought in the past to interpret the unknowns, seek explanations, look beyond the invisible wall of your helpless eyes.

So for us today. In the epicenter of a world crisis with still rarefied outlines, we are looking for threads to weave a plot of hypotheses, to recompose an intricate mosaic, whose overall design still eludes us.

However, the world of the future that we have painted so far does not seem to correspond to what we would have imagined. As far as suggestions, new awareness and unexpected changes take place, it looks more and more like a dystopian fairy tale.

A fairy tale completely opposite to those representations that announced the primacy of the human being over the widespread economy, well-being and knowledge, freedom from the yokes of existence, the end of poverty.

On the contrary: we are offered the prospect of an isolated and suspicious society, atomized in structures and affects, on which rests an insatiable desire to control minds and bodies created through the pervasive and highly sophisticated tools of technology and medicine.

The dark sides of the future

In these pages we have endeavored to track positive elements in unresolved situations and multifactorial, to seize favorable signs wherever you were, without giving in to the easy conformism of the “plot” and its grotesque, revealed truths. Because – we know it – behind every conspiracy there is above all the will to feel part of a side and evolved assembly. A select, minority, elected, reserved group, impervious to the simplified solutions used to calm the ox people and their Bedouin occurrences.

Those who feel part of this alignment, however, often do not realize that they are equally participating in a multitude. Ignore how vast the front of dissent can be, how extensive the desire to replace the ferocious pain of uncertainty is with a new, disturbing solution. It matters little if this new version of events is populated with secret plots, hostile maneuvers, mysteries and dark vicissitudes, attacks on democracy and unmentionable interests to be maintained.

Any truth is better than a non-truth; any gaze is better than a non-gaze, especially if this must be turned towards the deep abyss and its specular darkness impossible to bear. Each divinity, it is said, needs another god to succeed: otherwise there is nothing left to believe in and from nothing there is the risk of being swallowed.

Of this army in revolt, however, a section on other stands majestic and shiny. The ability to nourish the Doubt. Whatever the context of reference, troublemakers, finicky and nonconformists have taught humanity to think otherwise, moving away from the straight tracks of the official dispatches to bring side streets, inaccessible, dead ends and tunnels. Their courage and their carelessness have made it possible to often return an opposite or different version of the facts of reality; helped rewrite stories, extended narratives, have turned the coin to confirm how the genuine will of the case.

Thanks also to their contribution, today it was possible to reflect on the concept of emergency. On what it means and who may cause or lead. What you are willing to do to avoid it, what you can give up, as far as you are willing to give up. This pandemic, which immediately had the traits of the emergency, huge leaves open questions. Starting from the first, with no answer.

If this really is the future that awaits us, why does it look damned like that future from which they had warned us?

The hypothesis that this pandemic has been exploited to bend resistance and impose measures that otherwise would not have been accepted, this hypothesis I said, risks in many ways becoming more than a rash conjecture.

From the invasion of technology – which is transformed from a medium into a condition necessary for existence – to the irruption into the body dimension, which ceases to be an inviolable temple of inalienable rights. From the robotization and dematerialisation of work to the disappearance of all the representative and collective protection bodies, the same that have assisted the birth of workers’ rights still in place. From the mutilation of interpersonal relationships to the censorship or suppression of all opinions that are not strictly technical, as if the right of expression is the exclusive prerogative of a single group.

It makes us smile to note that the solutions suitable for combating Covid 19 correspond largely to those proposed in the past to cope with other extraordinary conditions, in turn defined as emergency. And it should be discussed, not so much of the seriousness of the events (of which, we have seen, there are serious reasons for concern), but rather about the legitimacy and sincerity of those who propose the ways out: their interests and motives.

And also: what role have these alleged saviors played in the genesis and development of the crisis of these months? Have they been able to use it for some purpose? They were able to direct it, encourage it, bend it? The whole discussion then moves on the technical possibility, understood as the highest form of human rationality, its ethical limits and in charge of its control structures.

Relentless technique

From Adorno onwards, we understood that science and technology – this must be fully understood – do not work for a purpose. They do not work to achieve a specific goal but exist as such. Their desire to know, tame and control every aspect of existence – from the patrol of space to the domain of nanoparticles – responds only to the imperative of scientific provability. No other limitations, be it ethical or intellectual.

We can no longer even talk about technology at the service of mankind: today technology has become self-referential to the point of placing itself at the center of the entire contemporary human history.

In this absence of limits and containments, it is clear that if something can be done by science, we must be sure that sooner or later it will be realized. Whether it’s building a less polluting machine or designing a supervirus, it’s just a matter of time and available means.

Here we do not want to reiterate the thesis that the Covid 19 pandemic is a sort of action induced by some neo-terrorist with desire for domination. But to reiterate the fact that, even in the face of these events, it is necessary to react and defend oneself “as if” they were a deliberate action for the purpose of maintaining or managing power.

We must allow ourselves the luxury of profound reasoning, which is not a slave to the momentary needs and urgencies of the news. A reflection that applies ethical restrictions and precautionary protocols, that focuses on the public good and collective needs.

Act “as if”

The long lockdown and the forced restrictions we have undergone have somehow allowed – and it has been written in many places – to stage an unprecedented social experiment. From the compression of freedom of movement and work to the limitation of democratic rules outside constitutional bodies, it was possible to evaluate how science and its technical offshoots were able to subvert the planet’s agenda by dictating new rules not approved by any elected or democratic body. This is peaceful.

As it is common ground that the truth about the facts was laid in the hands of a group of specialized and technical people not bound by any control, therefore potentially absolved by obligations and laws. A profoundly undemocratic precedent because where opinions are not subject to discussion, the requirement of transparency and the subsequent phase of public debate are necessary to generate a shared judgment.

The lack of sharing then leads to public participation only through belonging to conflicting and opposite factions or sides. These merely record stance-packed, stance-packed stances, which are adhered to by pure faith mechanisms. Who is here, who is there: both, however, flattened in the dualistic and bichromatic logic. All however unable to govern the intermediate space, the modulations of gray, the nuances that reality always feeds on.

Like any story, the possession of exclusivity allows the construction of a narrative frame within which everything can be inserted without showing obvious contradictions. A frame that can be used to frame wishes other than those purely instrumental to solving the problem, so as to give new meaning to common words.

The forced distance therefore appears “beneficial” and not “alienating”, the forced violation of the body becomes “healthy”, control over individuals seems “necessary” and “reassuring”.

To anyone who cares about the maintenance of democratic rules, the principles of civil coexistence and the laws for the protection of the individual, can only generate alertness that intricate tangle of substantial subversions similar to those we are experiencing. That there is a “great common danger” which we must face, must not relegate us to the reassuring condition of leaving the choice and surveillance to others.

On the contrary, all this directly concerns us with the responsibility of developing questions and questions, always placing ourselves in terms of the contradiction towards the official reality. In short, put ourselves in the position of nourishing the Doubt as a primary source of personal and collective protection. Prevent communication strategies that are used to ridicule those who ask questions, to alienate those who do not feel similar to group logic, to blame those who demand discussions and shared choices. There is much more at stake than is generally believed:

• A holocaust of constitutional principles, of all the norms that have matured with struggles, conflicts and civil wars
• The mechanization and standardization of generations through a lightened and lackluster education, designed to produce mass consciousness, docile and disjointed
• The penalization of the working dimension, through a free assistance system which undermines the country and lays the foundations for the disintegration of all collective consciences
• The deregulation of private capital, with the consequent exponential growth of large economic entities with absolute powers
• The institutionalization of fear as a divisive and dominant sentiment, used to drive people away and create conflicts within the communities
• The production of an aseptic and parceled man, who does not know the value of his freedoms and is ready to sell them in the name of a handful of lentils

Whether all this seems science fiction or unmotivated, let’s say it over time. After all, where the democratic defenses yield, where the emergency proposes a state of things out of the ordinary, the attentions and protective measures adopted by all of us must also be extraordinary.