ETHICAL SUBSTITUTION

IT 

EN 

Restoring the primary aggressive instincts to create a climate of violence within social experience, and then act with brutal repression and exaltation of authoritarianism, is one of the purposes of theories about invasion and replacement by foreigners, but only the poor, therefore dirty, ugly and bad, delirious by the rising right of consensus in the context of the increasingly Anglo-Saxonically hegemonized “West”. Ethical substitution, with the replacement of Calvinist capitalist morals on the original values of the cultures of central-southern and eastern Europe and of the religious doctrines rooted in them, predominantly Christian, Catholic and Orthodox, and in the Jewish minority, is the keystone for understanding the changes in the way of social action that are increasingly dramatically evident in our present.

Ethics is that set of values that, in addition to keeping an ethnic group significantly coherent, gives each individual a sense of opportunity for existence. The presence of the principle of justice gives human beings the path to the genesis of the future, which can be as warm and welcoming as it can be cold and repellent, thus creating the story of the psychic imagination and of man's relationship with himself and with others. Ethics is central to the construction of the other, and in the Anglo-Saxon Calvinist value system this is defined mainly as an adversary and contender in the struggle to achieve the individual goal of material enrichment. This elaboration of the psychosocial processes of relationship generates an all-encompassing and aggressive present, which engulfs the future and leaves the person in the tragedy of infinite isolation, full of ghosts of annihilation and persecution.

The reaction to the failure to form a welcoming future and the threat of annihilation resulting from extreme conflict and the struggle for social competition, is inevitably violent. The instinct for conservation attacks any threat to the existence of the individual, who, in an extreme delusion of persecution, generates indistinct destruction around him. Contrary to what was feared by many parties in the debate on the consequences of the seizure of institutional power by the right, and therefore on its attempt to replace the anti-fascist foundations of our cultural system with anti-democratic values, I believe that the creeping and poorly aware ethical substitution taking place, that carried out by Anglo-Saxon culture, is more to fear.

Not that the consequences of the ruling right will be negligible, what remains of the welfare state, of public health will be destroyed, privileges for the powerful will increase, and the rights and guarantees of the most fragile parts of society will be diminished. On the other hand, the right, a mixture of ignorance and submission to power, will do its job, and this will not be sufficiently countered, also because of the ethical convergence induced by the hegemony of culture, of the positive value of wealth, of competition, of the glorification of socially de-responsible individual freedom. A symptom of this condition that our culture is experiencing is the continuous hunt for the culprit, to create objectives on which to offload the responsibility for a malaise that often has much more extensive and complex causes. For example, when one analyzes the problem of the growing aggressiveness of young people, or their inability to adapt to reality and to react to frustrations, one often rants at other categories, such as parents, accused of irresponsible anti-educational action.

Not that this is not true, but this is how the problem moves from one category to another, creating new monsters that, if now doomed to sink into hell, one day will not be able to help but deal with them, if we want to understand the origin of their discomfort. In reality, what we don't want to deal with, shifting from time to time the responsibilities and the faults of every wickedness that occurs in our moral village, is the majestic pervasiveness of culture coming from the economic, military and media power overseas. The unsuspecting adherence to the Anglo-Saxon cultural model creates, in addition to the natural defense of the principles disseminated by it, the inability to participate in criticism and the contrast against mechanisms of manipulation and social virtualization, such as advertising and social networks, experienced increasingly passively, grasping only their utilitarian and narcissistic conveniences.

What we don't want to deal with even more is the customs clearance of wealth, no longer meaning the grabbing of resources at the expense of others, but of legitimate conquest to glorify individual value, as prescribed by the Calvinist creed. Today, in our global society, those who dare to criticize wealth, or even rant against it as a crime against humanity, are experienced at least as suffering from serious social maladjustment, probably belonging to some whimsical, if not subversive, catastrophic-millennial sect. The beginning of this massive wave of ethical mutation can be traced back to the early 80s of the last century. I remember well the gigantic advertising signs that suddenly appeared along the busiest streets of our cities. “Go home in a hurry, there's a booger waiting for you,” read the slogan that managed to convince millions of Italians to lock themselves in the house to drool in front of the screen of the newborn commercial TV, later better defined as 'junk TV', imported as it is from America by Berlusconi.

But if millions of Italians allowed themselves to be bewitched and profoundly culturally conditioned by the new toy paradise projected on TV screens, this was above all the exacerbated symptom of a malaise already present in our society. A civilization is not only made of folkloric frills and cultural symbols, it is also made of memory and attempts to dispose of all the aftermath of the tragedies that occurred back in history. And our history was full of catastrophic experiences, and without having to look too far away, just behind our shoulders the bleak mausoleum of fascism and Nazism stood out, with the succession of the blood of the war that had flooded the rubble of the cities and souls of the European peoples a few decades earlier. What is certain is that those who succumb to the flattery of the new cultural paradigm offered by the garbage television of Berlusconi and his cronies, were certainly not helped by the lack of opposition that should have come from the progressive political and opinion movements that, precisely in those years, were about to give in to the disengagement of the ebb.

In fact, after the enthusiasm of civil redemption in the 70s, which brought (in addition to the best music in the history of humanity...) important achievements in the field of labor rights, minorities and community life, there was a complete disintegration of the most advanced cultural currents. These were weakened by the fatigue of ideological struggles, all too often converted into criminal terrorist violence, and ended by the manipulative action of the new reactionary cultural agent, who showed up in Italian families with the mellifluous smile of television barkers. Social changes always have complex motivations when these do not result from sudden bloody and dramatic events, and this also applies to the replacement of moral values that occurred in our civilization. Without complicating and expanding the discourse with increasingly demanding analyses of the origin and cause of the ethical mutation that we have experienced, considering that great cultural changes are possible only if there is a great common vision, a collective idea of change, the first step we must take if we want to get out of this regressive drift is to not believe in the saving hero.

If the most coveted desire in us who cannot surrender to the bleak and depressing vision of the deniers of the equality and sacredness of every human being, is to bring back to the closets of history the conceptual waste of racism, fascism, sovereignty and authoritarianism, we must first commit ourselves to becoming aware of the serious situation of conditioning, especially media, in which we live. Then it is necessary to get out of the castrating comfort, and accomplice in the manipulative action, of virtual participations and representations and recreate a real sociality. We will wait for a new collective idea of participation and of renewed libertarian and democratic pride to come to life from this, even with a utopian value, but one that knows how to read the present correctly, managing to come to terms with the past, to design a possible, warm, welcoming and bright future.