Beyond the Arena - For a new socio-economic system

By Pio Curatolo

In the first part of the book a series of critical analyzes on the Italian and European political situation are carried out. The second part proposes a radically innovative idea of transformation and reform of the political-economic and social system that concerns every human reality beyond its specific situation and location.
To the non-Italian reader, to whom this translation revisited by OLTRE L'ARENA – Il Movimento 5s e Grillo, gli Italiani e gli Altri, di questo e di un altro Mondo © 2017, I feel the duty to point out that, although it is evident the specifically Italian, or even personal, context that originally motivated me to write this book, the arguments and perspectives that my reflection reaches can be meditated on and enjoyed regardless of its original location, especially in the second part of the book. Political, historical, social and economic situations may have a geographical typicality, but this does not exclude that the issues addressed concern the present and the future of the overall world and of the "citizenship" that each one carries out there, beyond the particular place.
The author, with a health and sociological background, worked in the mental health services of Trieste and Perugia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pio Curatolo
• Release date: Jun 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220815857

Book preview

Premise.

It is still permissible to ask the question: what to do? Is it still acceptable and inevitable to adapt to the recipes cooked by the historic chefs of our crowded convent? Is the lowest common denominator of the indifferent but belligerent presence of the average citizen without remedy? Is the claim to reach an accommodation of local and world criticalities irreversible without a shared and renewed awareness of cause-effect relationships? Is the maintenance of an ideal and practical structure still convincing or sufficient, which increasingly lacks guarantees and perspectives? Is it possible to devise a scenario of better application of commitments and goodwill? Is an individual social and political life feasible that is endowed with paradigms and better planning than those cultivated and imposed by tested and contingent beliefs?

If the answer, especially to the first question, is no, then I must apologize for having trodden the hand in denouncing the unsatisfactory of the existing and the customary or newistic positioning towards all political parties, their current instruments, and matrices prevalent social and economic psychological. But if the answer is yes, then this answer must lead to a feasible, rational, organic, humanly and socially grounded and achievable outcome.

My answer is also yes, and I have tried to motivate and describe why and how.

To the non-Italian reader, to whom this revised translation is addressed, I feel the duty to point out that, although the specifically Italian, or even personal, context that originally motivated me to write this book is evident, the reasoning and perspectives it reaches my reflection can, especially in the second part of the book, be meditated on and enjoyed regardless of its original location. Political, historical, social and economic situations may have a geographical typicality, but this does not exclude that the issues addressed concern the present and the future of the overall world and of the citizenship that each one carries out there, beyond the particular place.

1. The initial meeting.

I found myself interested in the M5s precisely in the moment in which it, with a progressive and close sequence, carried out all the main phases that converge towards the formation of an effective and recognized political entity. The phase of the movement of opinion, its organization into a subject concretely engaged in the elections, its full institutional establishment in parliament. The undisputed and irreplaceable protagonist in carrying out all these phases was Beppe Grillo: he can undoubtedly be recognized, for better or for worse, what is today the M5s and much of the merit on the fact that today the M5s has occupied an important space in Italian political life, in daily news and in public opinion.

Beppe Grillo has always been a public figure. Not a good politician, not a capable entrepreneur, not a significant intellectual, not an important scientist or in any case a personality whose merits should correspond to the inevitable and just recognition and gratitude of the Italian nation and society. He was and is a comedian, and one of the most incisive and effective in the world of entertainment, who reached his maximum popularity on television, but who was banned from it when his corrosive nature and his courage against the tide put him against. political power, prevailing in Rai as elsewhere.

I believe that a large part of his subsequent path is to be attributed to this circumstance: the comedian who, by intrinsic nature, attacks and emphasizes on a broad spectrum every discordant note, every axiomatic arrogance, every order closed in its own autocracy, every behavior or attitude or role so-called upright, he had fully grasped that the targets of his irony did not remain, as usually happens, to support his arrows, absorbing them and then recovering their consolidated position, but reacted to his satire with the pretense of eliminating its source, and not demonstrating it. groundlessness or exaggeration, but removing the stage from which an injury to that majesty could still originate, which evidently thus proved to have, effectively or potentially, the faults that Grillo was going to find in his satirizing. His shows following the Rai ostracism, in theaters and palaces crowded with people sensitive to his enduring effectiveness and notoriety, have even more highlighted not only his being against the tide, biting and flogger, but also his becoming more and more explicit protagonist of the war against the power that had banned him from Rai, and against that power, those positions, that system that had to do, in different and coalesced forms, with what he came to know as poisonously nestled in Viale Mazzini.

All this, while Italian society was approaching the turning point of the century, touching chasms and amusing itself with insubstantial and hypocritical second republics, and with its citizens, or the vast part of them, enveloped in a mass eddy of carelessness and rumination of places common, all the more instrumental and rhetorical the more distant from the authentic and substantial coinage of the frank cultural and social positioning of which, only if not fictitious or boasted, democracy can live and benefit to determine that associated enrichment and civil progress of which it she is potentially a midwife. Despite the significant past and present excellences of which the Italian reality has been able and could rightfully glorify and benefit, which, although manifest and present, have had to suffer the fateful fate, with limited exceptions, of barbarism and degeneration, thanks to a long and negative work consciously or unconsciously carried out both in cultural and political institutions and in common practice; in dull and fetishistic privilege, in autocratic separateness, in clientelism, in pseudoprogressist or pseudoliberal stereotypies, in crocodile corporatism, in double-faced bigotry, in amoral familism, in prevented ostracism towards various cases of personal value and unconventional truth, etc.

In this age-old multi-generational conjuncture, in which shortcomings and viciousness have found more fertile ground than that offered to the good qualities of Italians, the world has experienced epochal transformations (geopolitical, environmental, systemic, technological). These transformations, mostly born elsewhere but accidents more than ever thanks to globalization, have therefore also involved Italy, inevitably capturing it in the conditions of imbalance deriving from what has been said above. The disparity between the overwhelming pressure of these global factors and the clumsy negligence in not adequately addressing them, as otherwise Italy would also have had the skills and resources to do so, has brought the general conditions of the country to the limit of unsustainability. and has made increasingly acute and consistent the angry or frustrated awareness of the defects and faults of those who for many years held the power to influence the course of things, an awareness exacerbated by an insistent and shameless series of patent betrayals of the common good , of shameful theft of public money, of a creeping attack on the hope and future of the younger generations.

In a situation like this, Grillo's professional inclination to go to the core and strike there without hesitation or mediation, however, no longer restricted to the dimension of the show but given and shared in public calls to gather crowds who were given the possibility of protagonism of a vindice mass improperity, and corroborated by a virtual meeting place (the blog) where the mirage of the horizontality was offered no longer of the audience but of the stage, and even of the collective writing of the creation to be staged, could only to have a formidable grip on a large number of citizens tired of being silenced by fake democratic apparatuses, citizens therefore intolerant of the impudent perpetuation of the underworld and meanness that have crept into politics and society, eager to collaborate proactively in the delineation of an alternative perspective, instead of to be passively and disappointingly satisfied with the sterile and ritual fraud in which a prolonged almost regime run had corrupted or defeatistically transfigured parliamentary democracy and collective life.

The phase of the government of the technicians (2011-13), that is the frantic idea that the prevailing parties had to adopt to avoid what had emerged as the coup de grace inflicted by creditors on a country with an uncontrolled debt and with a ruling class unable to straighten the boat, it filled the measure of people's distrust of the political class. For the haughty discussion of recipes which, while partly placating the blackmailing intransigence of foreign economic and political powers, whose caliber and physiognomy remain well known in spite of various disguises, practically stood sideways to the programmatically proclaimed guidelines (rigor with equity, growth) in front of a large majority in support of the government and in front of the entire population. Thus establishing the unreliability even of the category of technicians, to which the already demonstrated non-compliance of the political class in office had left scarcely room.

And so it was that a large segment of the population, now all too experienced in the impossibility of proposing the programs of the various political forces, aimed more at instrumentally intercepting consensus and perpetuating their self-referential tactics than at arresting and solving the worsening of the problems, was , just as she was more lashed by the pangs of the crisis and dismayed by the unbalanced arrogance of the government, almost taken by the hand of Grillo's early 2013 electoral campaign (no old-fashioned rallies and squares had been seen so crowded for a long time of the electoral campaign) and convinced en masse to mark the symbol of the M5s, reaching about 30% of the voters.

The other ingredients with which this result was achieved are also unusual for the Italian political scene. Meanwhile, in the founding document of the movement, the so-called non-statute, a turning point is essentially affirmed with respect to previous parties: the peremptory constraint for the elected to respect the program and not to become a traditional political class, having to remain more and more close to the citizens who absorbed the dynamics of the representative institutions, with the relative constraint of the duration of the mandate and reduction of the salary, and preliminarily recognizing Beppe Grillo as the political leader of the movement (meanwhile he is the owner of the symbol and of the blog), with the prospect of the widest and most free participation of citizens (each is worth one) in the democratic formation of proposals and programs. With an official program consisting of about twenty points with the aim of achieving a redistribution of wealth in favor of those who find themselves without income, greater support for small businesses, a more incisive promotion of measures in favor of eco-sustainability, an incentive and liberalization of the conditions of digital citizenship, a squeeze on the costs of politics and an account of its past work, and other ideas of hypothetical and even progressive sensibility regarding the welfare and functioning of the state.

2. The impact.

The non-statute and the program represented the official recognition label of the M5s product, and as such it was known and exhibited long before the elections in which the most formidable results were achieved. But they could not, on their own, be exhaustive without also considering the behaviors in the most practical and real occasions in which the movement and its leader have concretely proposed themselves. The locations for carrying out these behaviors, in their continuity and concreteness, can be identified in the meet-ups and in the blog.

Of the meet-ups, local meeting and discussion circles, I have an objectively poor knowledge, since it was enough for me not to feel I was getting closer, to see the bumper arrogance found on the site of the meet-up closest to me. In which it was made to understand how those who wanted to make their own personal contribution to the activity would be unwelcome, without the prejudicial acceptability consisting in having been active in the territory from the first hour, and therefore, if this was not the case, liable to be considered aspirants to political recycling or the profiteers of a different political placement. This singular wording was changed only after my comment on the blog, but subsequent findings also to this cleaning confirmed the correctness of my first impression.

On the other hand, I have a deeper knowledge of Beppe Grillo's blog due to having frequented it regularly for a few months since April 2012. voters and citizens, is perhaps the most interesting and attractive element of this tool. For those who have gained awareness of the no longer tolerable drift of society and politics in Italy, the blog offers the maximum opportunity to express themselves in this regard and to compare their opinions with those of others. Attending the blog is constantly accompanied by posts by Grillo (and a few others) which feed and corroborate the iconoclastic examination of behaviors, situations and characters of the social and political condition. But the blog is the political organ of the M5s and as such a propaganda and organization tool, with the relative links that refer to particular activities and events or to the program and official documents, as well as being a showcase for advertising that favors the publications of Grillo or close to him.

This conformation therefore has unusual characteristics in the Italian socio-political panorama and its success largely derives from this, given Grillo's disruptive ability to propose or convey, alongside the arrows, also prospective glimpses of that change that in various parts of the world begins to be discussed and affirmed, except in Italy where a plaster cast and habitual inability to promptly take new paths tends to stagnate. This conformation and these results are indisputable from the point of view of a general judgment or comparatively to other analogous realities, but it lacks what can only derive from a continuous participant observation and for a sufficient period. Experience from which different elements are deduced and not always coherent with the vaunted positivity resulting from the facade impression, however tirelessly propagated by the M5s, or from the exhibition of its success. In fact, if the daily life of the blog can potentially benefit from the favorable structure available, the dynamics that I have seen expressed in it greatly attenuate the positivity of the overall impression.

If during my frequentation of the blog, with the hope motivated by the awareness of the intolerability of certain national situations and also with a confident credit entrusted to a radicalism that, even if pushed, did not initially appear disproportionate to the size and nature of the Italian problem, I met, among a multitude composed of incitators, skeptics, denigrators, indifferent people in a phase of excitement or depression, well-intentioned people, special people who brought their added value, etc. (as is the case in a blog), also the increasingly clear and reaffirmed emergence of a dynamic capable of denying and diminishing any anticipated hope and trust.

In fact, I have seen the indolent neglect with which the most thoughtful and most cultured comments were allowed to flow away, and often even attacked and vilified those who dared to articulate sensible criticisms and proposals that were outside the prevailing mood verbally barricading uniformed to the hammering of mantras official and approved. I saw the indecent betrayal of the ostentatious myth of direct democracy through the repeated postponement of the creation of the liquid feedback platform, and a palliatively abandoned forum with a deconstructed and dusty deposit of marginal and contradictory proposals and suggestions. I have seen the tribal apriorism put in place on the occasion of the choice of candidates in the elections, sectarian heterodirected by Grillo towards the prevalence of seniority in loyalty rather than towards quality, ability and competence.

3. Begin to focus.

To these findings, which can be confirmed by those who have had the good will to frequent the blog, we must add other considerations derived from what the M5s did when it found itself in the various phases of the passage from saying to doing, following the parliamentary settlement. The extent of the electoral success of the M5s was not consistent with the results achieved or pursued in Parliament. Grillo himself had predicted some unspecified difficulties if the movement exceeded 10%, but in the light of what was found in the following months it can be said that this was not so much a sign of justified modesty towards the arduous task that should have been to face, and as novices of politics, but rather one of the many alibis that the movement and its founder have not ceased to flaunt every time the knots of parliamentary life and the national situation came to a head.

Always symptomatically ready and in need of reiterating and exaggerating their own irreconcilable alternativeness with respect to all other political forces, and always reluctant to demonstrate in the contradictory - instead substantially avoided with the repeated formula of take or leave - the ability of their proposals to overcome, specifically and with regard to the general context, the comparison with those of others.

And this from the time of the consultations for the formation of a government, after the elections of February 2013, which had not provided any political force with sufficient numbers to not find program agreements with other forces. To remember the streaming with Bersani, where the 5 stars were able to say and do nothing but blame all the faults of all the Italian evils to the old political class, with the consequent thesis that no agreement or programmatic convergence could be reached with anyone for to give Italy a government of convergence that would address at least the most urgent and fundamental problems. And on the occasion of the election of the Head of State, where the name of Rodotà was played, once again, and beyond the value of the person, more as a factor of preventive disavowal of the entire political class and of a conditioning tribute to be offered to 5 stars to be a prelude to the mirage of unspecified and phantom vast prairies of dialogue, rather than as a lofty and unifying proposal. That in this circumstance the behavior of the other parties, in the first place of the PD, is screwed into a kind of tactical and truffle chaos, this must be attributed to the person directly responsible, but this cannot alter or conceal the behavior of the 5 stars.

After these decisive and revealing circumstances, and with a Letta government formed, with delay, only thanks to Napolitano's further monitoring sacrifice, parliamentary life has inevitably returned to being prey to Berlusconi's very personal disturbances, conditioning the entire intertwining of proclamations reckless and tactical blackmail, that is what the life of the government has been, despite the different dosage of weights and influences.

Throughout this period, the M5s stood out for its repeated verbal aggression against all other political forces and even institutional offices, as well as for the indefatigable and fundamentalist claim to have their immutable programmatic points approved by parliament. While, from the point of view of the internal dynamics of the movement and of communication, there have been numerous cases of elected persons silenced by the head or expelled from the movement or resigned following the impossibility of expressing themselves freely, and the awkward and laughable avoidance of questions from journalists, except for sporadic cases starting months later.

3.1. First figure-ground delineation.

An ordinary citizen, who wants to be fully aware of the situation of the country that concerns him and who therefore cannot and does not want to incur the erroneous and scoundrel habit of an improvised superficial and corrective evaluation, certainly cannot escape the defects and faults of others. political parties, their representatives as well as their voters (a speech, this of the voters, all to be developed adequately, without exemptions or hypocrisy).

In fact, these faults and these defects have been known, denounced and represented for a long time; but the new, formidable, absolutist Italian political phenomenon, the M5, was expected to be objectively and constructively consistent with the alleged and globally uncompromising contestation of the old parties; that is, that this dispute was as much the result of an intellectually inflexible and in-depth study of the Italian, historical and social reality, as, therefore, capable of providing, alongside the complaint and reductively vindictive commercials, the proof of a knowledge and competence that were in able to constitute an articulated and concrete idea of alternative, general and national regenerator (if we want to consider this dimension still valid, and it seems to me that we cannot do without it yet in the current contingency).

This test, its successful overcoming, could not, among other things, be understood, as well as accepted, as a mere scholastic exercise. Because it was not a prelude to the gratifying but limiting recognition of the value of a cultural and civil education, but was and should have been aimed at the reconstruction of a nation, restoring or introducing values and actions capable of restoring or re-establishing ideas and practices capable of permeating and revitalize the entire and complex depth of the Italian reality.

But Italian politics and society have limited themselves to touching and bragging about this essential and primary dimension, instead of actually animating it. And the M5s also managed, unexpectedly, to do more: after messianically proposing itself to the Italian people as the only political protagonist capable of achieving the salvation of the country, it scandalously denied this promise and, with it, the confident breakdown of delays with which a large part of Italians failed to continue voting for the old parties to give credence to the possibility of a radical change from previous bad habits.

The self-exonerating insistence with which the M5s has reiterated its positioning within an elite fort, thus making it more minority than its more than consistent numerical strength in parliament, cannot, in the face of a certain type of promises and expectations, constitute a demonstration and a consequence of the indubitable and established validity and superior diversity of this new political subject; but instead, and unfortunately, the opposite.

In fact, if the numerical strength had corresponded to an ideal and cultural endowment of importance and in any case objectively functional to tackle the inveterate mass of Italian problems with effectiveness and depth, not only would there be nothing to lose in constructively comparing this wealth of proposals and ideals with those of others, and in the face of the entire country, without binding in advance to the irreconcilability of any compromise in principle with those political forces that had at least shared the start towards a different direction of government, but it should even have been done everything to be part or support of the government, to be able to validate them the greater credibility and resolutive positivity of their proposals. Knowing that, even when only a part of these proposals could be realized, the Italians could sanction, with the next vote, merits and demerits. While in the meantime, due to the strength already gained with the elections in February, it would have already begun to direct the route of the common boat in the desired direction. No justification can be sufficiently convincing with respect to missing this opportunity.

We can continue to say that in any case the other parties would have persisted in not wanting to change, not wanting to respond to the pressing and sometimes dramatic situations of so many citizens, etc., but playing around with this argument ends up proposing an entirely propagandistic alibi; since no existing political force, with or without government responsibility, could have escaped the overt need to change certain structures that are no longer systemically sustainable or acceptable, and to pay for the many alarms, distortions, unsustainability that swarm in Italian society.

For example, the fact that the Letta government, in October 2013, has worked hard