Italian
It is rhetoric. Borrowing Marx’s insight on religion, we acknowledge today that the new “universal faith” has become the ability to persuade. A secular cult where the truth of the fact no longer matters, but the effectiveness of the narrative
ITALY. We get excited about ideals and flags that only rhetoric can transform into action. When we celebrate the past, we do not do it to understand it: we do it because rhetoric convinces us of its necessity. It matters little to know what really happened, or what the actual historical processes were. It is enough that the event is packaged with the right emphasis, capable of igniting and moving us again, even if just for a few hours, as long as the judging mind is clouded.
In this scenario, words lose their communicative function to become a persuasive weapon, evident and not hidden. Trivial slogans, often irreverent, turn into weapons that rhetoric knows how to sharpen with precision to make them deadly. We are accompanied every day by a deadly boredom: an evanescent chatter, skillfully declaimed, which, although few of us want to distance ourselves from, still envelops us and convinces the majority. It is here that power plays its best game: rhetoric is its shield and, at the same time, its sustenance.
As we distance ourselves from everyday reality — the harsh, difficult one, made of oppression and indifference — the rhetoric of “good” and “solidarity” reassures us. It is the triumph of linguistic gattopardism: everything must appear changed, as long as nothing actually changes. We feel good and just through words, precisely when in our daily actions we are not, or worse, we do not have the strength to be. Even rebellion, when swept up in this wave of verbal impact, loses its transformative charge and becomes a pose, an aesthetic of dissent.
The only way out seems to be a return to the origins of critical thinking. We should go back to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, sifting through our thoughts everything that is presented to us as “certain” or “venerable.” The commitment and suffering of a conscience that does not yield to the persuasion of rhetoric.
