De Rita’s Italy, mediocre and depressed. Only a shock will save us

Giuseppe De Rita is 90 years old. But the social and political panorama that he painted first in the interview with Massimo Franco in Corriere on December 30, then yesterday in Rep., is an unheard-of freshness, a precision punctuated by his own charm contemptuous and pungent. Among the founders and now president of Censis, his words return an Italy with an unequivocal physiognomy: a society that gravitates around fixed points from which it seems impossible to escape.

There is a word to which De Rita often returns, an emblem of his sociological and consequently political analyses: mediocrity. The country is “mediocre”, the Meloni government is “mediocre”, Conte’s opposition is “mediocre”, he said in the brief answers given to journalists. The mediocrity that characterizes Italy is a state of suspension: a “floating” that “has been going on for a little too long”. To clarify, De Rita calls into question none other than Sigmund Freud. Italian mediocrity would be none other than the famous “state of latency”described in the Three essays on sexual theory. “He has bones, flesh, brains, but he’s not yet shaped by adolescence, nor challenged by the future.” An eternal child. And as with all children, Italian infantilism is above all marked by an egocentric, individualistic drive.

In fact, mediocrity for De Rita could only be overcome with a “precise goal for the future”. An ambition, a hope that they will be able to involve, if not all of them, at least a large part of the population. But right here the problem arises: because society is no longer able to perceive the future “as a challenge to be faced collectively”. Everything is only personal, individual. Even the pandemic, which initially for De Rita would have deceived with his therapeutic capacity, has remained a “problem that concerns only others” for the average Italian.

Already described in this way, Italian individualistic mediocrity would appear dramatic, disheartening. But De Rita goes further. Ours is basically one “depressive stasis”he told Rep. A part of society is crossed by brief tremors – such as the birth of the Meloni government, for example – but then everything returns to the way it was before. The cause, again, is the lack of a glue capable of truly uniting society: “Those who voted for this government are not ideological, they are a variegated people who chose on the emotional wave of their own interests”. An emotion as intense as it is infertilesince it is self-referential, closed in its own exasperation.

So here’s that the current lack of a “real” ruling class it becomes nothing but one of the most evident effects of this exacerbating individualism. “The middle class never became bourgeois: we didn’t make it. Pasolini always said that (…) the Italian will never be bourgeois, he remains a petty bourgeois ”. Politics, on the other hand, is made “with collective subjects”. From thought and dialogue, Italy has risen in opinions: volatile slogans condemned to impermanence. Politics, society, even perhaps intellectuals: everything is evanescent for De Rita. Which gives a name to this phenomenon: presentism.

How to get out then? It is clear that, beyond his judgments on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, it will not be a single person or a single government, at least in the short term, that will represent a lifeline. De Rita’s answer is peremptory: “Without a shock, Italy will not come out of latency”. What Freud probably would have called trauma. The cure of the sociologist is eminently psychoanalytical: a maturation – the exit from the “state of latency”, to paraphrase Kant – which will be reached “from the deployment of energies as a response to the crisis”. But according to De Rita it will take “fifty years” to be able to express “a neo-bourgeois identity”.