Coronavirus announces revolution in the way of life we ​​know

                                 

Domenico De Masi reports drama in Italy and says neoliberal logic has to change

Italian sociologist narrates the dramatic situation in his country and argues that the impositions resulting from the pandemic , such as work at home , solidarity and the role of the public sphere, demonstrate that it is possible and desirable to change the market logic of the economy and create more rational and beneficial ways of living for the contemporary world.

The Italy from which I write, one of the most lively and joyful countries in the world, is now just a desert . Each of its 60 million inhabitants thinks he is immortal, that the virus will not touch him, that he will kill not him but someone else. However, in the silence of their hearts, everyone knows that this illusion is childish and that this mysterious, abstract and tangible pandemic at the same time, chooses its victims at random, as in a Russian roulette.

In a while we will know if the virus can be stopped or if it will kill us en masse, just like the famous Spanish flu did last century , which killed 1 million people a week for 25 consecutive weeks.

I have lived for 50 years in the center of Rome, on the busiest street in the city, which leads from Venice Square to St. Peter's Basilica.

This street is usually clogged with traffic, tourists and pilgrims 24 hours a day. It has been silent and deserted for two weeks . Only occasionally does an ambulance siren scream and a homeless person passes by. The entire city is ghostly like the "Blade Runner" Los Angeles. Here, however, even the extraterrestrial replicants disappeared.

Public places, schools, factories, shops, stations, ports and airports are closed, Italy is now a country separate from the rest of Europe and the world. Each city is at a standstill, each family locked up at home . Anyone who leaves without knowing the very few reasons allowed is immediately intercepted by police rounds that impose very severe penalties.

The ancient Greeks considered that when something is indispensable and yet impossible, the situation is tragic. It took 50 days, thousands of sick and dead people, for the Italians to understand that the situation is, in short, hopelessly tragic.

What does a pandemic like that mean for Rome, for Italy, for humanity as a whole? How does it act in the minds and hearts of all of us who, armed with powerful technologies and artificial intelligence, until a few weeks ago felt like lords of heaven and earth?

We suddenly found ourselves fragile pygmies in the face of the immaterial omnipotence of a virus that, through mysterious ways, escaped from a Chinese bat to come and kill men and women in our cities.

The subjection to an unknown virus, for which there is neither cure nor vaccine, has transformed Italy into a huge armored barracks and the 60 million Italians into so many docile soldiers engaged in a gigantic military exercise in which they are obliged to learn the truth that they previously ignored. obstinately. Which does not mean that they will apprehend it.

In a Europe where, until yesterday, the free movement of people, goods and money was allowed, now each country, instead of embracing an even more solidary collaboration with the others, locks its own borders , deluding itself in a cynical and childlike way that it is possible to stop the virus with customs barriers.

However, today, more than ever, sovereignties seem like fanciful attempts against globalization. Today, more than ever, the spread of the pandemic and its rapid return to the world have shown that halting globalization is like opposing the force of gravity. Our planet is already that “global village” that McLuhan spoke of, united by misfortunes and the will to live, needing a unitary direction, capable of coordinating the synergistic action of all peoples who wish to be saved. In this global village, no man, no country is an island.

Perhaps we have learned that the case is now life and death and that no one can face such a cunning and potent virus alone. Therefore, resources, intelligences, competences, actions and collective institutions are needed. Coordination and general cohesion. A cockpit is needed, a competent government with authority, a team formed by a political apex of great intelligence and supported by the maximum representatives of the medical sciences, economics, sociology, social psychology and communication.

Perhaps we have learned that facts and data must prevail over opinions, recognized competence must prevail over simple common sense, prudence and gradual interventions must prevail over arrogant decision-making and reckless improvisation. On the other hand, it is necessary to tolerate the mistakes of those who have a terrible responsibility to make decisions , a leader who must be generously supported so that they can be improved.

Perhaps we have learned that, in the face of an unknown virus, as well as in the face of a complex problem, decisions about the pandemic must not only be made by the competent people, but also be communicated in an univocal manner, with authority, promptly, comprehensively and clearly. All the alarmism, all the exaggeration , all the underestimation is terrible because it confuses ideas and makes us lose precious time. Lack and excess of information are harmful parameters. Superficial talk shows and delusional fake news lead to cynicism and dehumanization.

Perhaps we have learned that, in civilized countries, well-being is an indispensable achievement. Luckily and for the wisdom of our parents, the Italian Constitution of 1948 considers health as a fundamental right of every human being. The 1978 health reform, on the other hand, established a universal national service that considers health not merely as the absence of disease, but as complete physical, psychological and social well-being.

Thanks to this health regime, all residents (as well as tourists) enjoy medical care at no cost. This enabled us to discover and cure contagions promptly and reduce the number of deaths.

In the richest and most powerful country in the world, the United States, where welfare is stupidly mortified, Covid-19 suspects must pay the equivalent of € 1,200 for the test. The spread of the corona virus would cause a real catastrophe among 90 million Americans who, lacking health insurance, would be cynically rejected by hospitals.

Neoliberal propaganda, which spread under the insane banner of Reagan and Thatcher, discredited everything that is public in favor of the private sector. However, on the contrary, in these tragic weeks, the efficient reaction of hospitals and civil servants to the emergence of the pandemic has taught us that our public health , like other public functions, has much more than the private sector. professionally prepared, motivated and generous people up to heroism.

Every night, at 6 pm, all the windows in Italy were opened and each one sings or plays the national anthem to thank the doctors and all the health professionals.

The pandemic is teaching us that Keynes's thinking remains precious . In 1980, the Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas Jr. observed: “You can't find any good economist under 40 who calls himself 'Keynesian'. In universities, Keynesian theories are not taken seriously and cause smiles of superiority ”.

Today, this historic crisis, with its dead and its tragedies, if on the one hand leads us to recession, on the other hand reminds us that, in order to avoid an irreparable crisis, instead of austerity policies, it is preferable to give way to massive public investments and “Open-ended”, even if it leads to a public deficit.

Perhaps we have learned all this and several other things from what happened outside the home, that is, between the government and all the people of the country. However, today, our life is segregated between the domestic walls. Everyone is restricted within the four walls of the house itself: not only the families who live in harmony and agreement, but also the lonely ones, the couples in crisis and the family nuclei in which the dialogue between parents and children has long been shaky.Industrial society had accustomed us to separate the workplace from the place of life, making us spend most of our time with bosses and colleagues in companies: those that sociology calls “secondary”, cold, formal groups, in which people relationships are almost exclusively professional. A minimal part of our time saw us meeting with family or friends, that is, with “primary” groups, warm, informal, involving.

Suddenly, compulsory rest at home forced us, in an unprecedented way, to total isolation, to forced coexistence that for some seems pleasant and reassuring, but for others it is invasive and even oppressive. The luckiest ones manage to transform depressive leisure into creative leisure, combining reading, study, playfulness with the amount of work that is possible to perform under a “smart working” regime.

We theoretically knew that this type of distance work allows workers to save precious time, money, stress and alienation; and to companies, it avoids micro-conflicts, expenses in maintaining the workplace and promotes increased efficiency, recovering 15 to 20% of productivity; to the community, it avoids pollution, traffic clogging and road maintenance expenses.

Now that 10 million Italians, forced by the virus, quickly adopted telecommuting, minimizing their sense of worthlessness and the damage to the national economy, we wonder why companies had not adopted such a lean and effective form of organization before. The answer lies in what anthropologists define as the “cultural gap” - cultural gap - of companies, unions, bosses.

The free time that, until a month ago, seemed to us a rare luxury, today abounds. Space, which in the empty cities has expanded, in turn is lacking in homes. For this reason, we are appreciating the help that comes to us from the internet, thanks to which, even if we remain forcibly distant, it is possible to meet virtually, to inform ourselves, to confront, to encourage ourselves.In this seclusion, young people have the biggest advantage, thanks to their ease with computers, while old people have more advantage because they are more independent, more used to being at home, doing small jobs and sedentary games, being content with television.

In everyone there is a fear that, sooner or later, the supply of supplies will end. The collapse of the economy is becoming more and more inevitable, as both production and consumption are blocked.

A few years ago, Kennet Building, one of the fathers of general systems theory, commenting on the opulent society, said: “Whoever believes in the possibility of infinite growth in a finite world is either crazy or an economist”. And Serge Latouche added: “The drama is that now we are all more or less economists. Where are we headed? Directly against a wall. We are on board a pilot without a pilot, without reversing and without brakes that will crash against the limits of the planet ”. Latouche proposes to abandon the consumer society with a planned, progressive and serene decrease.

The reverse and the brakes that neoliberal culture has doggedly refused to use now have been unleashed: not thanks to a violent revolution, but rather to an invisible virus that a bat blew over opulent society, forcing it to rethink itself.

“The Pest” (1947), a prophetic masterpiece by Albert Camus , may help us in this rethinking. In that novel, science was the protagonist, that is, the doctor Bernardo Rieux, busy until the end, as a doctor and as a man, to help those infected, while “the smell of death dulled everyone who did not kill”.

Today, we too, like our very human brother Rieux, are caught in a limbo between grief and hope, in which we have to learn that "the plague can come and go without the man's heart being changed"; that “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can remain asleep for decades on furniture and clothes, that it waits patiently in rooms, cellars, bags, handkerchiefs and papers, that perhaps the day will come when, misfortune or lesson to men, the plague will wake up their rats to send them to die in a happy city ”