The Silvio Berlusconi in us

There is a certain embarrassment on social media in the face of the death of Silvio Berlusconi, which forces an immediate assessment of the last decades. Our country has been influenced at every level by a man who has tried to impose himself in every sphere of public life, and it is important to underline, in particular, the unease that many progressives are experiencing in these hours: a displeasure that is intimately disconcerting, that he is ashamed to tell and that he seems to be the son of a mass Stockholm syndrome.

Berlusconi, in fact, held the Italian imagination hostage for thirty years, prompting us to consider complex speeches boring and useless and to give space to thoughts and actions resulting from the basest instincts. None of us can say that we have been immune from this influence – manifested through television and all the media, most recently also TikTok – and none of us can really describe what this country would have been like without Berlusconi.

Berlusconi has rewritten our entire corpus of values, using mediocrity as the foundation of truth and public success as an index of quality, making it not only acceptable but desirable for all the vanity, the embarrassment and the baseness that live there. He ridiculed the established power, the judiciary, intellectuals and anyone who spoke of ethics and collective values, trying to transform an entire country into a company, telling us that the common good was stuff for deluded or hypocrites.

He created a huge bandwagon of many foot soldiers and a few jesters, convincing us that nothing can change, that it’s all a farce, that basically everyone thinks only for themselves, and thinking of an alternative means being silly or dirtier than the others. If so many people believed him, it was because of his ability to understand the distrust, impatience and fragmentation of a country which Benedetto Croce, at the end of the 1940s, in his Soliloquies he told of envy, bad mouthing, a passion for gossip.

Twenty years before Cavaliere took to the field, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote that «no fascist centralism had managed to do what the centralism of the civilization of consumption has done», and that «it is through the spirit of television that the the spirit of the new power”. And Berlusconi’s television, with its baggage and its stripes, has educated us since we were children to prefer cunning to intelligence, viscosity to authenticity, approximation to preparation, mockery to cooperation.

Let relatives and friends justly mourn the human being; Italy, on the other hand, today has the possibility of recognizing a cultural hegemony which, if it has had the great merit of reminding us how dark the well that everyone inhabits is, has however always pushed us to wallow in it and to mock every time those who proposed alternatives.

Perhaps even without Berlusconi Italy would have become “a country of jingles while death is outside”, but we cannot deny that what happened would not have happened without someone capable of intercepting base instincts and normalizing ideas from which we thought we had been vaccinated.

And now inside some of us there is this perverse affection, this sorrow for the kidnapper’s farewell, which is the ultimate joke. Paraphrasing Giorgio Gaber, it should be said: from today we no longer have to fear Berlusconi in himself, but Berlusconi in us.