Shall We Make a Broth of the Lame Duck?

Now that the duck is lame and the little duckling stumbles over the droppings he has scattered everywhere, we should reflect on how it was possible for a man already reduced to America's laughingstock, as he was at the start of the last presidential lesson, to overturn in a few weeks the enormously disadvantageous position he was in, despite his dreadful gaffes, the unconstitutionality of his own proposals, his blatant disinformation, and the indisputable superiority of the alternative. Everything changed, as anyone who followed events will remember, from one day to the next, with the entry into the field of Elon Musk, who backed the Republican candidate with all his channels of communication, pouring millions upon millions into the election of the Tycoon.

Was it violence? Yes, it was violence. A cognitive violence, exercised not with the club or the iron fist, but through an army of hired provocateurs who acted almost militarily on the social networks in order to condition information: a situation that may once again turn around overnight, exactly as it did then, since those systems, wholly privatized, depend exclusively on how much you invest in them and will always answer to the will of the oligarchy that governs them. If we do not intervene on the system, we shall always be subject to that kind of subversion.

For this reason, I believe we should intervene, across national borders, to limit that ideological and monopolistic power, restricting the freedom of the individual in favor of the collectivity, which should never be made capable of subjugating the collectivity to its own will. This naturally raises an ideological problem as well, because the concept of freedom is itself an ideological concept, depending on which freedom one means: not "freedom" in the abstract, but the freedom of someone. Whose?

Ideology does not mean imposing a point of view on others, but recognizing that within society there are points of view shared by groups of people in conflict with one another, owing to the variety of the interests that move them. Ideology is the debate around these points of view. Unfortunately the term has been historically debased together with a whole series of historical prejudices concerning one particular field of ideology, that of historical materialism: on this operation of manipulative transfiguration there is ample room for a healthy debate.

On the relation between the collectivity and the individual, I would return to an old adage: the hive survives when a bee dies, but a bee cannot survive if the hive dies. For the individual to be truly free, he must always be so within a collectivity, since his freedom ends, and always will end, where the freedom of his neighbor begins. I would therefore not trouble myself over whether the egg or the hen came first, but would rather focus attention on how the collectivity is always compelled to defend itself against an individual, or a minority, that threatens its integrity and survival, just as ants can all together assail an elephant. An individual who claims to subject the collectivity to his own exclusive dominion is withdrawing from the laws that guarantee the survival of that collectivity, and in claiming to be no longer part of it he becomes the elephant who tramples the anthill.

Democracy is designed to guarantee the separation of those powers which dictatorships, monarchies, and oligarchies tend to gather in the same person, or in a very small group of persons; democracy itself, without the vigilant control of the collectivity, without its participation, always risks degenerating into autocracy, or oligarchy, or worse, plutocracy. For this reason the class struggle does not begin with street protests, but much earlier, with the people's self-awareness as the engine of History, hence with culture, debate, the free circulation of ideas. The "revolution" is always inward before it manifests itself outside us, but for this to be possible a horizontal, not pyramidal, system of communication must be established, so that "truth" does not become the monopoly of an elite. For this reason a limit must be placed on the popularity of the individual, as they do in China.

By limit I do not mean a million "followers," but the monopolistic attitude, the concentration of ideological power, the absorption of all competing companies, the instrumental and militarized use of visibility to condition the behavior of a collectivity or of the institutions that govern it: in other words, the subversive use of the fourth estate, which is precisely what is at work in profiled social networks, that power which twice brought Trump to the White House.