Freedom is not a gala dinner: “uncivil” disobedience in the time of social media
In an era characterized by the chaotic sounding board of social media , so immediate, so oleographic and slippery in the perception of the reality of the message conveyed, and by the rage of the pandemic crisis, which after a year and a half has polarized the public debate well beyond the point of no return, there is a phrase that seems to emerge in the air, as if returning to the surface of the water after a long, motionless apnea.
It is civil disobedience. We read about it, we hear about it, we see it painted on the signs that pile up in the squares or on the virtual bulletin boards of citizens who, between a very good morning kaffè and a post on some very secret conspiracy, are keen to communicate to each other, and to communicate clearly to the government, their being gods. rebels, descamisados to the Pancho Villa.
One of the ugliest characteristics of contemporaneity is undoubtedly that of having created the illusion that everything is easy, simple, linear and basically at no cost. Even the revolution. Even the rebellion.
Just pick up your computer, after having gobbled a slice of donut and drunk a cappuccino, open your Facebook profile and write some call to arms on it, and you will feel better, at peace with the world. Maybe even smarter.
The act of dissonance and dissidence with respect to established power becomes a Baudrillardian hologram, a copy originating from any original. And that is why freedom is claimed, rights are claimed, but then it flows back into the Italian 'let's arm ourselves and go', always leaving the infamous 'other' to devise the how and to carry out some conduct, undergoing some often the consequences that are usually also unpleasant.
The social revolutionary fearful of the authorities inveighs against plots, against the abuse of power, against the illegitimacy of laws, evoking the natural law force of natural law (without knowing what it is, of course), but then before the real force of public power he will bow the head and will let the others go in front of the metaphorical firing squad.
When Henry David Thoureau wrote, at the beginning of his "Civil Disobedience" , that "the best of governments is the one that governs least", he could well support it, having experienced the inside of a prison and above all having built his own , coherent and organic vision on the structural injustice of public power.
And on the other hand it will always be Thoureau, a few pages later, talking about his confrontations and clashes with the person of his neighbor who is the tax collector to write as in a state that imprisons anyone unjustly, the place of the just is prison.
At one time, before affirming disobedience, the problem we had to deal with was deconstructed; in other words, the object of disobedience.
Today, on the contrary, in the narcissistic cacophony of voices, crumbled ideas, sloppy projects, conspiracy to buy, the hedonistic virtuality of an act of refusal directed against nothingness or shot at zero elevation against the wrong target just to show itself in public takes precedence. and only because in the Telegram chat or in the Facebook group the leader on duty proposed so and then one must follow, one must comply, and replace the state Pied Piper with another kind of Piper.
One ceases to be self-determined individuals and falls prey to a psychotic digital collectivism that screams, screams, threatens, confirms itself in apodictic convictions.
At one time, the disobedient was a critical spirit, with alert and attentive senses, and moving on the delicate, brittle ridge of the border between legality and illegality, he had to feed on wise forecasts and capable analysis. Today, however, you share a meme and think you have made the revolution.
But then there is another aspect that makes contemporary pseudo-rebellion unspeakable and pernicious: the unwillingness to accept risks on one's skin for actions or omissions, of disobedience, becomes inversely proportional to the narrow, filthy and mean idea of having to pour them onto the shoulders of those who appear to be their antagonists.
Let's take the question of the Green Pass : hydrophobic packs of no-vax with the strategic sense of an otter take it out on the exhibitors who request it, given that the law obliges them to do so. They accuse them of being collaborators, of lacking courage. And in so doing they project their structural cowardice, their lack of courage, onto the shoulders of others.
Because what they contest, that is, adhering to and respecting an allegedly unjust precept of law, they pour out entirely on the shoulders of another, of a father of a family, of an owner of an activity that is still licking his economic wounds today.
It's clear: a sixty-year-old whose only reason for living is by now sharing nonsense online, from the top of his state pension, without having to bear the economic and social costs of his positions, can certainly afford to cheer up a restaurateur exhausted by a year and a half of lockdowns , limitations, selective closures, capacity reduction, sanitation costs, goods paid for and thrown away.
These boycott actions are attacks on the self-determination of merchants and merchants who choose, according to their decision and convenience, to adhere or not to the precept of the law, they are assaults on their commercial and individual freedom and their property.
If it is considered unfair to have to show the Green Pass or if you think that the given restaurateur is wrong, change restaurants without having to make collective calls to arms or prima donna scenes.
The sixty-year-old retired revolutionary must also feel discreetly transgressive and maudit in adhering to telephone boycott projects: the restaurateur is called a 'collaborationist', he books and does not show up.
So much to the retiree who feels Jesse James who cares, he will dine with Findus sticks watching a Vanzina movie, but not before saying goodbye to his fellow digital wrestlers on the worst social channels, being pleased to have ruined the evening for the restaurateur. sufficiently rebelde .
For heaven's sake, there are also those traders who knowingly remained open during the closures imposed by law and faced sanctions, authentically disobedient to them, but generally these always become the champions and the moral shield and alibi of all that mass of other sloths who prefer to transgress through a third party. Their gesture is debased and debased by the collective interpretation of the conspiratorial flue.
When Lysander Spooner, in 1844, created the American Mail Letter Company to counter the public monopoly of postal mailings, he was well aware of the consequences of crossing the sword against the state Goliath, yet full knowledge that the matter would not end. well it did not induce him to give up.
The US government took seven years to bend it, clearly resorting to legislation and ex lege imposition of the monopoly, after the judges had recognized the competitive reasons for Spooner.
It is therefore no coincidence that Spooner, in "Law of nature" , defines legislation as taking possession of control by an individual or a group over all the others: he knew what he was saying, having passed through it and carrying on his flesh still the scars of the empirically proven truth of that assertion.
But Spooner did not make other post offices fail with tricks and he knew that the problems, once they arose, he would have to face them, offering (in metaphor) the chest to the firing of the state guns. He did not escape, with some tricks, nor did he look for comfortable scapegoats.
The tragedy of the present time, the illusion dripping with ignominy, is that everything is simple and painless. At best, the dramatic cost of certain choices will be borne by others. This is the reasoning of the salon revolutionaries who meet following hashtags and operetta characters.
On the other hand, the very concept of civil disobedience implies total self-responsibility, up to the extreme consequences: if a law is considered unjust, according to principles of reason or natural law, the damages of the individual act of revolt are not paid to innocent subjects. , outsourcing the weight. Others are not boycotted, because they are considered 'collaborationists'. Which reconciles a comment on the semantic barbarism in which we have fallen, given that certain comparisons have really exhausted.
You are not Agamben, you are not Cacciari, and the speech they make, shared or not, is not that the vaccinating doctors are the Hitlerian Einsatzgruppen , or that the new extermination camp is hidden behind the physiognomy of the vaccination centers, for love of God. We try to maintain a minimum of intellectual decorum and a sense of proportion and history.
Agamben and Cacciari speak of criticism of government choices in the general framework of a potentially authoritarian twist of civil life and of the legal system, on the impossibility of making the emergency permanent, postulating the specter on the horizon of a Schmittian state of exception that it ends up inoculating itself in the order and in the social conscience step by step, provision after provision.
Even the tragic trivialization of critical thinking becomes another negative externality of the digital simulacra of disobedience. Disobedience uncivilized, it must be said.
Because it turns gray and makes everything inert and conspiratorial matter, even the most serious and thoughtful arguments. The Facebook conspiracy hermeneutics of Cacciari's positions is the best ally of the established power imaginable, just as the collective phone calls of false bookings are an unworthy activity and a war of all against all, to the great joy of the state power that assists in solace.
On the other hand, as R. Vaneigem wrote, transgressing the taboos, this is how economic progress commands.
The rebel, on the other hand, like the pioneer, is the one with the arrows in his back. In his back. Not in that of the neighbor or the bartender or the restaurateur.
Disobedience, like freedom, is not a gala dinner, and if one wants to practice it seriously, one must be ready to pay the consequences, on his own skin.
The post Freedom is not a gala dinner: “uncivil” disobedience in the time of social media appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-liberta-non-e-un-pranzo-di-gala-la-disobbedienza-incivile-nel-tempo-dei-social-media/ on Wed, 25 Aug 2021 03:49:00 +0000.