Italian
The title of this reflection recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini’s essay, published posthumously in 1976
ITALIA – The author draws inspiration from a well-known line in Greek tragedy, which says that children are punished for the sins of their fathers.
Pasolini, observing the youth of the 1970s, considers this punishment necessary: half of the blame lies with the fathers, but the other half rests on the children, who must take responsibility for it.
What exactly is this blame? According to Pasolini, it lies in the passive acceptance of bourgeois consumerism.
Young people, justified and forgivable simply because they are young, end up feeling entitled to rebel, often with the support of adults. However, this rebellion is only superficial: it does not arise from a genuine desire for change, but from a need to express what their fathers were never able to express. Pasolini’s unhappy youth rebel without questioning their own doubts, without expressing their unhappiness, acting out of anger and defending causes they do not truly believe in. They want to “break everything” only to rebuild exactly what was there before.
From this comes a bitter realization: the youth revolution does not truly break the system, but reproduces it, shuffling the cards of a game that remains unchanged, with the same rules and the same players. For this reason, Pasolini states, at least for the half of the blame that belongs to the youth, it is right that they are punished.
The only way out of unhappiness—a condition shared by both young people and adults, all prisoners of a logic based on consumption and profit—is the use of reason: “Life consists, above all, in the relentless exercise of reason.”
In contrast to this bleak view, Bob Dylan’s poetic message in the song Forever Young offers a different tone. Here, the wish for the youth is not to remain in a state of sterile rebellion, but to preserve the ability to dream, to imagine, and to build: “may you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.”
Pasolini’s reflection reminds us of the responsibility that comes with critical thinking, while Dylan encourages us to find the courage to hope again. It is in this balance between reason and dream that both young people and adults may perhaps escape unhappiness and rediscover freedom.
