Passaparola - The meaning of life
(18:00)

Moni Ovadia's Passaparola
My name is Moni Ovadia and this is my first time on Beppe Grillo’s glorious blog. I must admit that I’m very honoured and excited about being here. All of us Italians owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to Beppe Grillo and his associates for everything that they have done for all of us. Apart from getting us more committed to a particular idea and a particular view, what Beppe Grillo’s MoVement, and he personally have done for us is a truly great service for this Country because he has had the necessary strength, courage and perseverance to reveal and unmask many unspeakable shameful issues. Without him and without the MoVement that initially blossomed around him as individual but that now has its own identity and independence, in many cases we would never have found out about those issues, nor would we ever have had the weapon that this MoVement and what it represents for us in terms of not allowing, or indeed even preventing the politicians from hiding their misdeeds.

Inside an asphyxiating economistic cage
In the great hubbub and the rumour mongering of the media, hidden in amongst the myriad of speeches being made with the excuse of the emergency, and I believe that the emergency is just another excuse for the powers that be to justify certain things that would otherwise be unjustifiable, but since there is indeed an emergency, we have to justify our actions, so they keep talking about the emergency, they quote figures, data, employment, unemployment, etc and, as if they ever did so in earlier times, they have tended to avoid talking about the real underlying issues, the issues that are important to the people. No one seems to ask themselves any common sense questions any more. I believe that one of the biggest failures of our society has been the destruction of common sense. We have been left to float in a pool of meanings without any visible horizon. Everything is asphyxiating, everything simply floats by and I think that the real issue is “what does living life really mean? What is the meaning of a human life or the meaning of a society on this Earth? Why are we here? How can we continue to be here?”
We have become progressively more confined to an asphyxiating economistic cage where all that matters are the economic figures and the first thing we are always told is how the markets are doing and how the markets are reacting. At least in theory, we live in democratic systems in which we actively participate in a ritual that is becoming increasingly senseless, specifically the elections, in the belief that we are appointing individuals to govern us on the basis of a programme. More often than not, we have no idea what their real programme is, but merely what they say on the television. In reality, the majority of the citizen voters don’t have the cultural background or even any of the basic tools required to read a programme and to be able to differentiate between what is the real programme and what is mere propaganda. What we hear is election propaganda, not genuine election programmes. Then we go and take part in this meaningless ritual that is the election, only to subsequently realise that, after all is said and done, our destiny will not actually be decided in total or even in part by the individuals that we put there to govern us, but that there is a conglomeration of economic powers known as “the markets”, which dictate the economic future of a country, since everything these days is all about economics, and even though we did not elect the markets, we are nevertheless subject to them. This in itself already proves that we are not living in a true democracy but rather in a very formal and essentially fictitious democracy, particularly here in Italy. Berlusconian Italy has become the cloaca of Europe’s pseudo-democratic systems, the sewerage drain, or indeed the cesspit of the most ridiculous and ill-conceived democracies, however, this is a general problem. Now that the sun appears to be setting on the Berlusconi era in this Country, we still don’t know why it has somehow managed to catalyse ancient failings in the Italian people and Italian politics. Berlusconism is merely a symptom, but the problem is actually something totally different. It is a conglomeration of ailments that combine to form an illness that includes conformism, servility, opportunism and a “You have to understand that I have a family to support” attitude that initially led Italy to dabble with fascism and now, 40 years later, with Berlusconism. So that’s where we actually need to look. But to find a deep-seated illness in a society, we have to address the issue of common sense, What is a society actually? I discovered that one of our founding fathers, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom I didn’t think much of and whom I viewed as a somewhat unseemly political leader during the “Risorgimento” era, which was supposedly a nationalist revolutionary era, wrote all about duties rather than rights, both in his book and his manifesto. He talked about duties to a population made up largely of farmers and manual labourers worn down by a succession of brutal, arbitrary, aristocratic and oppressive rulers to whom they were mere subjects.

The centrality of the human being
That’s why I never bothered to delve any more deeply into the history of Mazzini the man. Then, purely by accident, especially since no one ever taught me any of this at school, I discovered that Mazzini actually had some pretty disturbing things to say about the whole idea of nationalism and homeland. Mazzini said that a homeland and a nation are not defined by their borders but rather by a social fabric in which there are no privileges and one in which all men are equal before the law. A homeland, therefore, is a place where there is dignity in hard work and where every human being is given the opportunity to utilise his/her abilities to build him/herself a life that is equal to that of other people by right. This is common sense, otherwise what is a country anyway? For example, what does a country like Italy mean for a man such as Berlusconi? His culture? What is Berlusconi’s Italy actually? A bunch of companies that want to be free to carry on their business as they see fit, even if that means embezzling, breaking the law and evading tax! How on earth did such an Italy manage to come about under the very noses of the Italian people? Well, because the concept of belonging to a Country, to a social fabric, in the sense that was built into our Republic’s Constitution, has been totally lost on a very large section of the Italian citizens who are so in such bad shape as regards the kind of citizenship that guarantees you social and political dignity that they don’t even know what Article 1 of our Constitution says, namely “Our foundation will be that Italy is a democratic Republic based on work” because we can only talk of democracy if there is work and there is a certain dignity in work, common sense. However, this has been totally destroyed in favour of flexibility, sub-contracting, temporary work, the raising of the retirement age and the bosses’ interests.
So Italy is a democratic Republic founded on the principle of work, common sense, but the article in question doesn’t stop there. In fact, it goes on to state that “The sovereignty belongs to the people, who shall exercise it in the manner and within the limits specified by the Constitution”. How many Italians are actually aware that it is not the people who reign supreme, but the Constitution, precisely in order to avoid any populist tendencies that could turn this Country back to a dictatorship. Silvio Berlusconi and his courtiers and thugs have done nothing other than repeatedly talk about the sovereignty of the people without even realising precisely what they were saying, or perhaps they did but certainly the people that voted for them actually believed them, but why? Well, because they don’t understand the deeper meaning of that on which our democracy was founded.
Our democracy harks back to something even further back in time, indeed back to the origins of monotheism when the idolatry of power was defeated by storytelling. All human beings are equal because they have only one father and one mother. Given that God is both father and mother, this becomes a weighty concept indeed, a long walk of faith that destroys the non sense of power, namely oppression. It is a concept that governs man as an individual and replaces it with the centrality of man and of life, and the dignity, sacredness, sanctity, equality and independence of every human being, rather than power.
But this concept is something we never talk about unless it’s at some religious or literature Festival, but we never hear anyone discussing this on television. When we hear people talking about work, this concept should lead us to talk about the worker, the human being behind the work. All we ever hear about are the burden on the pension system, the temporary lay-off fund and obviously the pros and cons of Article 18, but what about the people? We never talk about man, or what life is all about? Shouldn’t work be a time and place where a human being fulfils a plan for himself, for his family and for society? Not any more it isn’t! All we talk about these days are numbers, not people. We have been sitting back and watching the priapic machinations of a tiny little man for the past 17 years, but we have done absolutely nothing for the people of this Country and of our European Union. Does this mean that we are not interested in human life? That we’re not interested in the life of the planet? Do we become subversives if we dare to demand that human life, life on this planet, animal life, plant life, our habitat and building our future be put at the top of the agenda? We are not even able to continue to plant new trees for the future. Our farmers used to plant trees even though neither they nor their children would ever get to pick the fruit, but only their grandchildren. We no longer seem to be able to do this, but why? Well, simply because we have altered the very meaning of life.

The lack of culture
Steve Jobs was a man with a true depth of vision. Whatever anybody says about him, he once said that death is a natural part of life because death brings new life. Death makes room for new life and the fact is that new life evolves in order to complete its own cycle and to have its own meaning.
So if this happens, this must be the meaning of life. Young people make their own way, but when undignified elderly people pump themselves full, like balloons and try to have the sexual prowess o fan eighteen year old, or rather they merely claim to have it because in actual fact they don’t, clearly this spells disaster for any form of inter-generation alliance, which should be a form of handover of the banner if you will, a collaboration in which each individual fulfils his specific role. It’s not a case of “Make way for the youth”. It’s merely a case of restoring the alliance between the generations because that is common sense and that is what gives some sort of meaning to life.
We have got to a point where our sense of existence has been totally short-circuited so that certain apparently virtuous social, political and economic phenomena can occur, but now the time has come to let common sense prevail, to talk about what makes sense and set the common sense horizon where we want it to be, because otherwise we will once again fall into the same old traps. The problem is not the berlusconism here in Italy because Berlusconi is 75 years old and, although he may still get to 85 or 90 years of age, he is bound to go sooner or later. The problem is that Berlusconi was able to do what he did, and the even more real problem is the up and coming politicians. Do you really think they are going to immediately introduce a new law to control conflicts of interest? Will they bring in a new Information law? Will they put cultural issues at the very top of their political agenda? I ask this because the real issues are all about culture, not politics. Berlusconism was first and foremost a cultural issue. Berlusconi imposed his own television subculture, the boobs and bums culture and all that kind of thing on the Italians. After that, winning the elections was an absolute cinch! And the opposition was totally unprepared to oppose this type of culture because issue of culture is nowhere to be seen on their agenda. The cultural issue is the mother of all issues because there is clearly a problem with the political culture and the economic culture and not only with the “court” culture.
I always say: “Take Dante, the melodrama, the beautiful monuments, the Renaissance, etc away from Italy, take away our cinema and Fellini and sell them to the Japanese so that they are no longer ours, and what will be left of Italy then? With all due respect to our industries? What is the metal bar of Brescia? Is this what Italy is made of? We have gotten to the point where a Minister of the Republic had the gall to say that you can’t put Dante on a sandwich and, worst of all, there was no public outcry whatsoever. If a French Minister of the Republic were to say that you can’t put Rassin or Proust on a sandwich, he would no longer have been able to show his face in public.
So, it is the common sense and the culture issues that allow us to provide the Italian people with the critical tools that will enable them to make informed choices because, clearly, there is a huge section of the population that currently doesn’t have the critical tools with which to assess what is happening, and that therefore vote on the basis of the candidates’ smiles or the horrendous crap that they speak, simply because they have the television channels at their disposal. I always jokingly say, and it really is only jokingly, that if I had had Berlsuconi’s means at my disposal, within a mere two or three years I would have had the communist flag flapping in the breeze over the Vatican, and with the Pope’s blessing at that. Now obviously that was a wisecrack and a joke, but why has all of this been allowed to happen? Well, because the political classes lacked the cultural and the critical assessment tools to understand what the most critical issue of all the critical issues really was, and still today we talk about the berluconism festival, but nothing is said about a law to counteract conflict of interests, which is something that should be under discussion. But that’s not all, what about a Media law that would prevent one individual from having so much power over the media, and why? Well, because we are still relying on improvisation and emergencies and we simply don’t have that common sense horizon that enables one to think about the laws that one has to introduce in order to build a horizon of dignity and respect for the equality of all citizens before the law.
I thank you for your hospitality and I sincerely hope that this will not be my last time here with you.