Socrates said it, if I’m not mistaken: “Only he who knows that he doesn’t know is wise, not he who deludes himself into knowing and thus ignores even his own ignorance.” Citizens or, if you like, voters as usual are recipients of an enormous amount of information about candidates, coalitions, alleged programs for the City and yet, they don’t know what really happens. So let’s try to explain it again. The run-off between Telesca and Fanelli next Sunday and Monday is a challenge that has little to do with the interests of the citizens and the city. It is a well-planned staging in the media and politically by people and groups who have always decided what the weather is like in the skies of the capital and beyond.
They act undisturbed thanks to the drowsiness of listless citizens, the naivety of others, the damn selfishness of still others. You pay the price of a local society lacking in politics and devoid of participation. Scarcity and emptiness filled over time by a subculture of well-being and a fraying of the sense of community. And there is no “Turkish parade” that serves to symbolize the confusion in which the city finds itself. And there is no Saint Gerard who cares, an anniversary that has lost the spiritual depth of the past to transform itself into an instrument of folklore.
The community culture of belonging has been in continuous disintegration for at least 30 years, it has frayed. There is the speed of a piece of society that continues to advance in terms of income, position, prestige capital; there is the speed of a part of society that slows down, retreats, worsens and creates problems of a different nature. The extended network of community ties is a family network of cunning. Potenza is the center of politics that consumes trust, eroding the moral foundations of social coexistence. The city is very close to what Censis once called the mucilage society. A mushy, pessimistic city, a mucilage of individualism and personal trimmings. A mucilage that swings in a vacuous, banal society, incapable of generating cohesion and development.
This is how the local “lords” want the city. This is how they built it with the complicity of unaware citizens and aware servants. Around those lords grew up young men and women from the grotesque and parasitic small and middle bourgeoisie, people who live on appearances and cheap vipperies. Often uneducated, but skilled agitators of “vulgar” rhetoric, aspiring to power and salaries in the public administration.
Telesca and his relatives, Fanelli and his retinue, are children of those everlasting lordships, which are regenerated through inheritance and transform everything without anything changing except for the better for them and for the worse for the citizens. Whoever wins the ballot, the challenge is between old and new lordships, but also not: because in the old ones there are pieces of the new ones and in the new ones there is the imprint of the old ones.
The city will change its face when it is led by a mayor, a council and a majority of cultured, visionary people. People who take thought, style and education as the foundation of their action. That they know how to invest in the future of the capital and its citizens, rather than in Tizio’s career, in Caio’s building permit and in Sempronio’s fortune. And this will happen when the people of Potenza want it, if they want it at all.
