Barbarism

 Barbarian, for a Greek of the classical period, was anyone who stammered. In fact, a "barbarian" was someone who did not speak Greek  correctly, or who did not speak it at all, and whose tongue rang in Hellenic ears like a clumsy, dissonant childish babble, like a bar-bar inadequate in relation to the thing named and, for that reason, as an incomprehensible mode of expression.

Babbling, in effect, means speaking with difficulty, eliminating sounds or changing their order, as children usually do. For this very reason, barbarism is a typically infantile characteristic. Isocrates said that a barbarian is not a foreigner in the sense that he belongs to another nation, but someone for whom education turns out to be strange, alien, so he lacks it, regardless of his place of origin. The barbarian finds himself, then, in a childish condition: between the wild and civilization. And, like all infants, he is, in Freud's words, "perverse and polymorphous." Perverse, for being an instinctive transgressor of the determinations of his Ethos, of his civility, because of his ignorance. Polymorphous, because in him there is not yet a "dominant drive", a clear and defined orientation of his desires or desires, capable of providing him with the degree of satisfaction appropriate to a healthy state of maturity.

 

In the history of humanity there have existed, still exist and without a doubt will continue to exist, perverse and polymorphous peoples, peoples, to put it once and for all, childish and, therefore, tendentially barbaric. Towns of infantile symbology, affected by the babbling of those who, club in hand and confusing freedom with debauchery, exercise the function of their parents or representatives. Peoples, in short, of primary colors and lullabies, whose infants prowl, polymorphically, between phallic signs and marches of closed –suspicious– circularity, always accompanied by the “eternal return” Everything depends on the degree of development that their cultural formation, their Bildung, can achieve. The first step has to be the definitive overcoming of populism. Because populism feeds on barbarism and, in turn, feeds barbarism. Again, it is a question of simple circularity, incessant, recurring. To the extent that a society assumes this barbaric condition, it becomes fascist, given the veneration of fascism for perversion and polymorphism, terms that, by the way, characterize it. It is, this time, a sort of Peter Pan complex, with which an attempt is made to deny the objective need to grow and develop, in order to achieve maturity.

 

Between 1803 and 1806, while in Jena – a town besieged and about to be invaded by the Napoleonic army – Hegel wrote in a notebook: “The freedom of the uneducated mass becomes misery and degradation. Not because the churches, the streets of pilgrims, the tombs of supplicants are empty of faithful. It is because, with it, there is a worsening of customs, an evil joy at the impoverishment of the envied rich; defamation, lack of fidelity and gratitude. The ruined economy, the debauchery of all misery, the most petty and destitute selfishness. With a lack of agriculture, with the ruin of the forests, with the decline of industry. And yet, in the midst of luxury.” An education –precisely, a cultural training– of poor quality ends in a poorly educated people, and a poorly educated people ends up in an “uneducated mass”, prey to barbarism, perverse and polymorphous. It is not about having gone to vote or not. Nor is it about the account of the voting records that "have not yet reached us." Nor is it the clumsy Byzantinism of someone who tries to differentiate between a plebiscite and a referendum, or between a fraud and a trap , or who finds abstention to be the primary cause of defeat. The real, absolutely concrete problem does not lie in the effects but in the causes: it lies in the urgent need to focus on the construction of a solid and mature civil society, educated, with ideas and values, mature enough and capable of overcoming itself, that is, to get out of spiritual poverty, overcoming the childish traps of easy populism.

 

Fairness without quality is, by definition, fraudulent. And it is precisely from there that the remarks made by Hegel derive. An effectively equitable society does not equalize the citizens “below”. Beyond the means, the goal consists in fighting for the conquest of a higher level, of an increasingly demanding quality of life, capable of propitiating the realization of civility in the face of barbarism, if one wants to conquer an authentic republic of worthy and free citizens. Demagogy is, in itself, a state of corruption. Populism and demagoguery tend to feed false expectations and create fictions that end in the worst disappointments. No matter what inclination one professes: there is a perversion and a polymorphism in every possible form of populism and demagoguery. Under the guise of adults, they are still children who lie to children and end up lying to themselves. Children who do not grow up, who do not make the immanent effort to improve themselves, will never be able to arrive on time for the banquet of civilization, freedom and progress. It's time to break the vicious circle, put an end to the bar-bar. Without an authentic educational and cultural policy, every society, regardless of the greater natural wealth it may have, will continue to be a society of ill-mannered children, of small barbarians, of potential tyrants.