The words of reality

Editorial by Stefano Lavorini.

We are at a very important turning point in terms of our future as a country, but we cannot risk living in the present, ignoring the past and failing to imagine the future.

Unfortunately, the facts are leading us in this direction.

I find a significant parallel in what is happening in terms of language. Cristoforo Clavé writes:

«The gradual disappearance of tenses (subjunctive, simple past, imperfect, compound forms of the future, past participle...) gives rise to thinking in the present tense, limited to the moment, incapable of projections in time. The generalization of "you", the disappearance of capital letters and punctuation are all deadly blows to the subtlety of expression.

In other words, arguably, fewer words and fewer conjugated verbs represent less ability to express emotions and less opportunity to process thought.

Studies have shown that some of the violence in the public and private spheres stems directly from the inability to put words to emotions».

And God knows how much this, today, has harmful effects.

The fact remains that until a few days ago we thought we were living in a moment in time which we could not only rethink and redesign our economy, our society, but also have, thanks to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, the means to do so, finally launching those structural measures that had been laid aside for years.

Then... then the war in Ukraine, the dramatic experience of seeing men transformed into prey, an aberration for the system of values that we believed had been acquired over centuries of western civilization.

A reality that seems irreconcilable with the world imagined and experienced up to now, that questions us on what it means to be human, on the place we occupy on Earth in relation to other living beings.

I can only say, along with Mario Vargas Llosa, that

«...I detest every form of extremism, based on small and exclusive ideas, which reduces the intellectual horizon and conceals within itself ethnic and racial prejudices, transforming into a supreme value, into a moral and ontological privilege, the fortuitous circumstance of the place of birth. Together with religion, nationalism has been the cause of the worst massacres in History...».

Yesterday and today, unfortunately.