Outward differences
Little help: what joins them is the same as what joins Right and Left.
Someone could turn up his/her nose at this statement but there is no affront to anybody.
The answer to the little game is: the underlying ideology, more precisely the paradigm within which they were born.
And us all together with them.
Is that clear? Not to everyone perhaps.
A clarification on the concept of paradigm will be likely to be useful.
Said in simple words, a paradigm is a thought which arises as basic, namely as a reference model and that therefore fixes the field within which we proceed with our research and observation and that can be spread to several fields. After clarifying this, it is plain that taking a thought and turn it into a paradigm is always an exercise of choice, and that choice always depends on the necessity of an answer to certain needs.
A question could perhaps rise at this point (and if it doesn't by itself , I will make it come up):
What is this paradigm that Berlusconi and Bersani, Right and Left and us all have in common?
Easy to get to the answer: we all born, grown up and feasted within an industrial economy system, have the mechanistic paradigm as the central one.
Realizing this ideological background where we all western people act is not easy. We have internalized it over the years so much, especially during the period of our educational formation, so anchored to the bottom of our conception of the world, that it is part of the atmosphere we have breathed since our first wail.
Our society directly comes from this way to see the universe and, since its birth, the supporters of this thought model, referred to as the architects of the modern conception of the world by Jeremy Rifkin, have assumed that it was not one of the possible ways to observe nature but the only possible way, since it was objective, neutral, universal.
This is how the first brick of the conceptual structure of modern science was put,and it was born in a context far from being neutral and universal but well specific and leading to well specific consequences. It is enough to quote here one of his theorizers, Francis Bacon, according to whom it was necessary to join human knowledge and power in science to achieve that cognition and create those inventions which "don't just act as a kind guide to the course of nature; they have got the power to conquer and subdue it, to shake it to its very foundations."
So it goes without saying how hard it is to make this paradigm an object of observation since we "observe through it". It is as if a person who is wearing glasses started looking for them, not realizing he/she is already wearing them. And we have been wearing this pair of mechanistic spectacles for so long that we need an effort to allow our eyes to get used to focusing on anything without them. In this sense it is difficult to find such a kind of analisys by the media or means of education.
To make an example, if we tune in on any TV channel and even though we have listened to a debate among politicians for only a short time, we notice that the item on the agenda is economic growth. It is also likely that we will be watching a heated struggle on the problems that prevent a faster and more considerable growth, on how to use public funds, on their best uses to encourage the pickup, and so on..
We will not be watching a deep dialogue on the concept of growth itself at all.
Maurizio Pallante has expressed this:
"This idea of growth, as a basic part of advanced industrial economy, joins Right and Left because both of those schools of thought (that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) have considered the growth a positive fact. And the struggle has been on the distribution got by the growth.
So, that the cake grew as much as possible was a good thing and people struggled on how to share it."
It is therefore clear the reason of this constant reference to GDP, means of measurement of the wealth of a country, by the several members of Parliament, and although its descriptive effectiveness has been called into question many times, it is still the great economic fetish.
Thus, it in within this background made up of GDP, economic growth and, more in general, the rules of the capitalist Economy of market, that we find the conceptual context where the different political views on the parliamentary arch are.
And it is normal it is like that, since that conceptual pattern hasn't been conceived in a neutral and universal context (like the founding fathers of modern science and, afterwards, of modern Economy were convinced), but in a well specific one: that geographic area where the great colonial powers have developed, powers which had all the interest in holding their position of "rule over the world" and for which the concept of wealth was well tied to the one of possession.
And since today those powers have simply transferred their essence to multinational powers, it goes without saying that there is not a big interest in a deep meditation on the bases of their existence themselves.
I find it optimal to put a thought by Noam Chomsky as final remark:
"The central device of the system of 'brainwashing under freedom', developed in a most impressive fashion in the country that is perhaps the most free, is to encourage debate over policy issues but within a framework of presuppositions that incorporate the basic doctrins of the party line".
(Pirates and emperors, old and new: international terrorism in the real world - Noam Chomsky)
Once upon a time...
How many people would agree to bring up a child by making him get used to thinking that the world is like in a fairy tale: full of dragons, with clouds made of candy-floss and trees ready to give them ice-creams for water and honey?
A child who grew up this way, would shape a well definite image of the world where he is going to venture to, mainly if during these tales he had to live in a house similar to a fun-fair, with reconstructions of those dragons, clouds and trees.
And how many people would keep on defending the same idea of the world when after a long journey the child, grown up by then, would find a world different from the one he had been told about during his childhood, even telling him that the failure of his research was due to a mistake along his way or in choosing the ways to walk?
Mankind has lived and has kept living in a sort of Land of toys with regard to the image it has of the Planet Earth, since the mechanistic view of the world has been introduced.
After the laws of the Universe had been found out, we got carried away in redefing our autonomy as sentient beings, independent of the dictates of a faith, as an answer to the obscurantism of Holy Mother Church.
And we have come to the comfortable banks of another faith: the one which relates to our endless capability to produce goods in an infinite amount, supported by a planet equivalent to a treasure chest with endless resources.
And, following the image given at the beginning ot this article, if the mechanistic paradigm is one of the two parents who have decided to bring up their child by insisting on fairy tales (and that the human being is reducible to a "machine to consume products" with endless needs can be considered just a fairy-tale, one of the sad ones!), the other parent who persists in reassuring him about his distorted image of reality even when, as a grown up, he bumps against the truth of facts, is the capitalistic market system.
Although the capitalistic building has already given the chance to see the cracks on its wall in different ways and in the past too, including the current crisis the domestic economies of western countries are going through, it seems that economists, the gurus of the new faith, aren't going to consider that perhaps the problem of this system is neither market regulation (following one of the main alignments) nor deregulation (following the opposite alignment), but on the bases on which the two foundations lie themselves. Foundations which "are made of the same substance as dreams" the bard would say.
And then we continue to tell our fairy-tale and defend it by saying:
"No darling. Don't worry. Persist in your research because dragons exist. Maybe you have looked in the wrong places. Maybe it is too difficult by yourself. Convince your friends to come with you so that such a lot of people will be able to find them for sure".
Now, it wouldn't be such an important thing to the human genre that most of economists, because of their background, can't complement their field of interest with the conditions which nature lays down, except for the fact that they are the "High priests" that governments have chosen as their counsellors. And delighted by the great amount of goods they have given to us in the last century, like children who are scared of losing all their toys, they and we are starting to open our eyes and find out that perhaps those toys have taken a lot away from us.
Nobody likes sudden awakenings, especially if we are dreaming something pleasant. And it is undeniable that for us, the part of the world which has tasted its juiciest fruits, Capitalism has been and is still a room full of comforts.
But, like suggested in "The Corporation", we should pay attention not to confuse that sense of speed and the air which whips at our faces with the image of a flight, when, actually, those feelings are due to a quick fall towards a big crash into the ground.
I'm not trying to present the experience of Capitalism as the absolute evil. In the history if humanity, periods when ways of thinking, lifestyles and social organizations are experienced have (and will still) come one after the other; all these are natural and formative steps for the whole human population.
The point is that the moment to face up to our responsabilities has arrived: we have the capacity to observe ourselves and recognise the world around us for what it actually is in time, not trying to adapt it to that mental image we created at the times of fairy-tales, without waiting for the violent impact of our solid dreams against the ground of reality.
Once upon a time...
How many people would agree to bring up a child by making him get used to thinking that the world is like in a fairy tale: full of dragons, with clouds made of candy-floss and trees ready to give them ice-creams for water and honey?
A child who grew up this way, would shape a well definite image of the world where he is going to venture to, mainly if during these tales he had to live in a house similar to a fun-fair, with reconstructions of those dragons, clouds and trees.
And how many people would keep on defending the same idea of the world when after a long journey the child, grown up by then, would find a world different from the one he had been told about during his childhood, even telling him that the failure of his research was due to a mistake along his way or in choosing the ways to walk?
Mankind has lived and has kept living in a sort of Land of toys with regard to the image it has of the Planet Earth, since the mechanistic view of the world has been introduced.
After the laws of the Universe had been found out, we got carried away in redefing our autonomy as sentient beings, independent of the dictates of a faith, as an answer to the obscurantism of Holy Mother Church.
And we have come to the comfortable banks of another faith: the one which relates to our endless capability to produce goods in an infinite amount, supported by a planet equivalent to a treasure chest with endless resources.
And, following the image given at the beginning ot this article, if the mechanistic paradigm is one of the two parents who have decided to bring up their child by insisting on fairy tales (and that the human being is reducible to a "machine to consume products" with endless needs can be considered just a fairy-tale, one of the sad ones!), the other parent who persists in reassuring him about his distorted image of reality even when, as a grown up, he bumps against the truth of facts, is the capitalistic market system.
Although the capitalistic building has already given the chance to see the cracks on its wall in different ways and in the past too, including the current crisis the domestic economies of western countries are going through, it seems that economists, the gurus of the new faith, aren't going to consider that perhaps the problem of this system is neither market regulation (following one of the main alignments) nor deregulation (following the opposite alignment), but on the bases on which the two foundations lie themselves. Foundations which "are made of the same substance as dreams" the bard would say.
And then we continue to tell our fairy-tale and defend it by saying:
"No darling. Don't worry. Persist in your research because dragons exist. Maybe you have looked in the wrong places. Maybe it is too difficult by yourself. Convince your friends to come with you so that such a lot of people will be able to find them for sure".
Now, it wouldn't be such an important thing to the human genre that most of economists, because of their background, can't complement their field of interest with the conditions which nature lays down, except for the fact that they are the "High priests" that governments have chosen as their counsellors. And delighted by the great amount of goods they have given to us in the last century, like children who are scared of losing all their toys, they and we are starting to open our eyes and find out that perhaps those toys have taken a lot away from us.
Nobody likes sudden awakenings, especially if we are dreaming something pleasant. And it is undeniable that for us, the part of the world which has tasted its juiciest fruits, Capitalism has been and is still a room full of comforts.
But, like suggested in "The Corporation", we should pay attention not to confuse that sense of speed and the air which whips at our faces with the image of a flight, when, actually, those feelings are due to a quick fall towards a big crash into the ground.
I'm not trying to present the experience of Capitalism as the absolute evil. In the history if humanity, periods when ways of thinking, lifestyles and social organizations are experienced have (and will still) come one after the other; all these are natural and formative steps for the whole human population.
The point is that the moment to face up to our responsabilities has arrived: we have the capacity to observe ourselves and recognise the world around us for what it actually is in time, not trying to adapt it to that mental image we created at the times of fairy-tales, without waiting for the violent impact of our solid dreams against the ground of reality.
