We have lived it before. It has been practiced. With determination and harassment. Intentional, ergo, maliciously. Political calculation succumbs to mediocrity. There is hardly a country left unscathed. The intellectual, ethical, and moral regression continues, with barely any margin for hope. The world tilts towards extremisms, all swollen with demagogy. Probably the worst form of government as the Greeks taught us. The most faithful mirror of an indifferent, irritable, and permissive society with everything. Perhaps unconsciously and passively we have all facilitated and allowed it. In our daily lives, with our passive behaviors and acceptance of a status quo that has weakened us as citizens. This last category does not even exist in all countries. Or perhaps, why not, we have breathed into that pyre spiteful breezes, rekindling old fires.
A poor favor to democracy and institutional values. Never before, since the interwar period, has democracy experienced greater weakness, and with it, harassment, questioning, and vulnerability. Europe has witnessed dictatorships and wars, terrorism and atrocious cruelties ―saving the Balkan war in the nineties, a genuine shame for Europe, and now the madness unleashed by Moscow in Ukraine―, and yet it has lived through the best decades of its history since the end of 1945. America saw its splendor collapse due to dictatorships and revolutions, guerrillas and terrorism, and today it tilts towards populism on the right and left, which sooner or later will devour politics itself, since ideology has weakened to the most iconoclastic nihilism, but, how have we reached this point? What happened to the American dream, for example, in the United States? What remains of that milestone today, 250 years after independence?
When thought dozes or is inane, sectarianism, polarization, the immoral Cainism of absurd trenches triumph, reducing dialogue and speech to a wall of intolerance towards the other, misunderstanding for all, and shame for a nation.
We do not need champions or defenders, but a lot of common sense. Solid, argued, brave, and firm positions. Whether in government or in opposition. The more useful and true this is, the stronger our democracy will become. Let us not enter solipsistic and sterile games. Let us not confuse the essence with the insubstantial and superfluous. Expired dead leaves and poor fertilizers of an uncertain future. The crust and the dead leaves simply prevent us from seeing, whether or not with blinkers. An order ends, a way of understanding partitocracy without parties or political elites, but economic ones. A mirror of a society as amnesic as it is unrepentant, as hedonistic as it is empty. Absent by nonappearance, civil society, never articulated, never threaded the root of its potential and its strength. It has never been of interest in this country for there to be an open, strong, dynamic, and proactive civil society.
We have not known how to value democracy. And we run the risk of losing it. Silences and complicities. Too many with their eyes set today and the indifference of the arrogance of past yesterdays. Successes and mistakes that have generated today contempt and weariness. The mud and the swamp into which some have turned the system with their depressing spectacle is capable of changing, of bringing a new moment and a new reality. It will demand the best from everyone, politicians and non-politicians, from ourselves as a society or part of an unashamed society that is beginning to be more committed to the public against the passivity and complicit silence of many decades where distraction and disdain towards politics have been manifest.
Increasingly, society, people, are more disenchanted with countries and porcelain states. Corruption suffocates us, also lies and deception. Terrible the cancer and the corrupting worm, both of the corrupt and of those who shelter them, who finance them and who lack the minimum moral scruple in an unstoppable decadence that drags the public swamp, but also, incidentally, the private. There is no general cause against it, but a society that generally accepts lies. What happened to public virtue, exemplarity, criticism, service, upright public conduct?
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We live in societies and moments where no one dares to think and truly reflect. The complaining society that looks towards indifference. Twisted reeds by the relentless and merciless passage of time and moral relativism. The crystal ethics. Ethics drowned by biting larvae of a crusty passivity. Patterns, behaviors, attitudes. Too much dead leaves. The ones that do not let us see under their carpeted, expired mantle of a permanent autumn. The dead leaves that envelop the everydayness of politics. Of the absence of criticism. Of vain and empty lament, sterile reflection, and biting cynicism. The ones that do not let us see, nor breathe. The dead leaves that devour us.
Let us dignify politics, the space of the public, where we are all, rulers and ruled, State and society. Let us recover credibility, conviction, capacity, trust. Let service and democracy prevail, not partisanship and internal autocracy.
It is time to assume an ethical, clear, objective, and truthful responsibility. Let us not wait any longer, tomorrow is too late. Decadence and disbelief lurk. After democracy, there is only totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Extremes and, with them, banality, unease, and the absolute sterility of a society asleep in its own stupidity and nausea. Gradual degradation. Grotesque spectacle. Permanent weariness. Let us lift the crust. Without fear. Because disenchantment has come to stay. Let us be wary of politicians.
Let us regenerate firmly and surgically. Clear scalpels, also in the domes, apses, and buttresses, vaults and architraves. Let us start from the roots. Let us seek exemplarity, decency, honesty, brave and constructive behavior, and eradicate mediocrity and merciless cynicism, fear and cowardice, intellectual atony and lethargy of criticism and values.
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