Hallucination devours reality.
And yet not all the effects of the virtual bursting into the dimension of the real are negative. There are positive ones too, and I have summarized them in my Tu chiamal e vuoi rivoluzione, released just very recently.
Among the negative effects we find the simplistic, hysterical, and hasty spectacularization of narrative.
Be careful, though: narratives of reality have rarely coincided with reality itself
One has usually made do with presenting distorted—if not outright false—scenarios, into which public opinion slipped uncritically (think of the “Cold War,” just to give one example). The balance of power demanded
Political vanguards of every color and every position, whether in power or in opposition, were instead able to read between the lines and to move beyond the tracks on which the train of banality was running.
Today that no longer seems to be the case. Everyone appears perfectly cast in the roles of an endless clash between puppets: “between Harlequin and Pulcinella they kick and beat each other, bones are broken, and Mangiafuoco takes the money at the till.”
What really makes one’s arms drop is not only the emotional and fanatical participation in fictitious causes, but the fact that by now everyone talks about Trump, Putin, Zelensky, von der Leyen as if they were holders of absolute powers—powers not even Genghis Khan possessed…
As if it were enough to replace them, or rather to “convince” them, to make their intentions change.
No one ever thinks about the substance
about the concrete motivations that trace lines which seem to differ from one another, but this happens only in narratives, not in choices.
Since the 2008 crisis, which marked a global shift in balances and a new race for energy sources, the American line has been fairly continuous, from Obama to Biden, passing through two Trumps.
The Russian line does not depend on the moods of the Kremlin’s mafia boss, but is dictated by the shocking lack of correspondence between aspirations to power, the vast physical and material size of the territory, and the anthropological and cultural inadequacy of Russians to play a leading role in a complex world.
No psychiatrist will ever cure Trump and/or Putin, because they represent, in some way, unavoidable tendencies. Certainly these tendencies could be articulated in less embarrassing, less Corleone-like ways, but that is a matter of aesthetics and elegance, not of substance.
Imagining absolute powers in the hands of those who manage the balance between powerful dynamics and real powers is a colossal political mistake. This is also reflected in the choices of terminal populism—not to be confused with realist populism, which does exist.
By fantasizing
that there is a king to be beheaded in order to seize power, or that if Soros disappeared there would be no more globalization, one produces all the embarrassing and disastrous “answers” of the marginal henhouses: from printing Monopoly money to Exits, all the way to the fairy tale of an electoral triumph that would hand over—no one quite knows to whom, no one quite knows which nonexistent absolute power—with which all our daily frustrations should supposedly be resolved.
We must recover an intelligence that refuses to be locked into binary schemes, that does not let itself be hypnotized by superficiality, and that can—and must—enable us to trace and follow the lines of our autonomous and sovereign destinies.
Which are not sovereigntist: that is a superstructure that paradoxically goes in the opposite direction.
Sovereignty must first and foremost be recovered within ourselves. Those who allow themselves to be imprisoned by today’s hysterical farces will not succeed.