Of Marcello Veneziani

Source: Marcello Veneziani
Fifty years ago, these days, the global protest took shape and air, which then became more simply '68. It will be this year's hit, years has already begun.
'68 was the last revolution in the West even if it wasn't bloody, he didn't throw down states, powers and regimes and did not change the system he wanted to overthrow. But the customs and language radically changed, school and university, the family and the relationship between generations, sex and the female role.
All this did not happen in 1968, but that year was considered the peak, the starting point, although signals had preceded it. '68 was an event that then designated an era. The world changed.
If you believe in symbolic coincidences, in '68 three symbols of the old Italy that believed in God died, in the homeland and in the family: Padre Pio, the saint from Pietrelcina, Giovannino Guareschi, the singer of the small world of Don Camillo and Peppone, and Vittorio Pozzo, the legendary commissioner of the national team who won two world championships and made the players sing patriotic anthems before playing. It was their doping, like the stigmata of Padre Pio and the White by Guareschi.
It closed with them a symbolic program of the old educational TV, It's never too late, by maestro Manzi. Liquidated those symbols, desecration exploded, the global world, everything is politics, and the "it's never too early" of rampant youth. Age was no longer a chronological condition but defined a class, an ethnicity, a power.
But what happened in '68? Poor in events, without major catastrophes, historical events, changes in power, '68 was above all a radical change in mentality. A cultural revolution, fortunately not like the one exalted by the Sixty-eighters in Mao's China, which cost a few tens of millions of deaths.
Therefore I will not tell you the story of that year which was a small thing. And not even his bosses and bosses. Instead I will try to take stock of his legacies.
To begin with, '68 widened the gap between generations. While young people broke down limits and borders, they built a wall between the old and the new and between the old, then called matusa, and young people. Politics broke out in every area, even in intimacy and private life. Anthropological mutation was praised: faces changed, and clothes, hair grew, the beard, the tones of voice.
But all this is only the surface.
Rather, something important and lethal happened? The connection between rights and duties was broken, between pleasure and effort, between desires and sacrifices. The transgressive passion for the unlimited arose, for the inaccessible. A childish romanticism electrified the young, the perception of being at the dawn of a new world, after the economic and demographic boom, towards a radical change.
Imagination came to power. That was the prevailing '68. Then there were minor outcomes, such as political extremism which then gave rise to violence and reached the point of terrorism. Or like the opposite, ecopacifism, which however was fueled by the same intolerance and the same utopian spirit. Or like drug abuse. Feminism also grew.
'68 was furiously anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist but in fact it served the bourgeoisie to free itself from the last Christian-respectable legacies, the sense of order and decorum, modesty and good manners. And it served capitalism to get rid of the last resistance to the absolute domination of money, of profit and consumption.
'68 struck family and love of country, authority and religious sense, tradition and moral sense; therefore it carried out a useful task for capitalism, to globalization and the cynical bourgeoisie, who then turns out to be radical and progressive.
'68 was a push into the world of yesterday, towards modernization. That society was not keeping pace with the changes, it was true. School and university, family and society were full of contradictions, hypocrisies and anachronisms; but those that emerged from the '68 wave were worse. Chaos and demeritocracy.
Il 68 parricide became infanticide, and after having dreamed of a society without fathers, he founded the company without children. '68 was born collectivist, choral, orgiastic but ended up individualistic, egocentric, narcissistic. Because it was the unlimited expansion of the subject.
The transgressions became mass conformism, the revolutionary lexicon became a bigoted catechism and after having fought the hypocrisies of bourgeois language, the hypocrisies of “correct” language were established. Also the 68, like the Baroque, it had its rococo.
The effervescence of those years did not produce creative works worthy of staying, but a permanent attitude of a perennial child, capricious, sulky and misunderstood, which attributes personal faults and natural limits to society.
Society was less repressed but more foul-mouthed, more open to women but more broken up in the family, it put young people at the center but in the long run it did not regenerate itself, did not adopt replacements, she became the oldest on the planet. He preferred impulse to reason, chaos to order, the immediate event to history, emotion to culture, aesthetics to ethics.
Less was selected, the capable and deserving were put out of action, a hedonistic society grew up in its place, irresponsible and joyful, even if intimately depressed and desperate, full of comfort and disheartened. The reference figures declined, the teachers, the parents, the priests, the military, the police forces, which actually fell into disrepute.
This left '68 in the West, especially in Italy.
A few steps forward, many steps back, and below. The promised liberation created more alienation and more frustration. Society became more unhappy, lost the naivety of the sixties, without gaining the maturity of an adult and conscious life.
And he introduced the dark ones, leaden seventies. On the political level he replaced communism with anarchist radicalism, individualist and libertarian. We have never recovered since '68.