Many cannot help wondering about what is going on in our country. Why has a relatively peaceful spell been followed by one strike after another?
Why are trade unions unable to handle their members? And why do there rage bitter controversies along a justicialist trend in parliament, both within and outside every political alignment, whenever reforms are the issue?
Why do members of parliament elected during the last election polls refute the ideologies they have always professed, thus creating yet another sterile controversy within their party and so on? It is a case of constantly doing and undoing, of economic scandals, of the savings of a lifetime’s work just vanishing into thin air and so on and so forth. What is going on? In short we could theorize that these are the same events that occur in a house where one decides to restore order and cleanliness after years of neglect.
The semblance of order is replaced by chaos. Disorder is unavoidable when straightening up and bringing about change. Stressful days await family members, who irritably grumble when they do not find something in its usual place; neighbours protest for the noise caused by workers; suppliers and labourers do not deliver their consignments or complete their jobs in the established time… and so on. This is more or less what happens when innovations are introduced, when now obsolete useless items collected through the years are thrown away. This is what is taking place in Italy, the nation, needless to say in a larger scale and with more serious problems, which, on the other hand, have been left unsolved for years. There was nothing new for fifty years, just the usual routine. The semblance of orderly cleanliness only required garbage to be shoved under carpets with the opposition’s approval.
A few scandals were soon hushed up to favour the interests of one party or the other, even though ‘Pandora’s’ cauldron overflowed with sensational issues. An impelling need for change has developed in this stagnant atmosphere, the need to adjust regulations to new social issues.
But change requires acquired rights to be questioned, rights that may even have been acquired arbitrarily or by prescription. And this is when chaos begins. Everyone, some more and some less, has for years had reason to protest against the excessive bureaucratization enforced in our country; hence one says: ‘All the better if the course of files is at last simplified’. But the Parmalat financial scandal has reared its head. It has hit the front pages and has naturally been followed by a series of TV talk shows.
All TV shows invite the usual personages, experts in finance appointed to suggest effective solutions that can be rapidly implemented to avoid financial plots and fraud against shareholders or at least to make them harder to organize in all firms quoted in the stock exchange.
The popularity rating in these cases is always very high, while extremely low standards mark the trivialities said and proposals they generate. The hope of reducing bureaucratic lengthiness has already been disappointed. In this case the proposed solutions make controls even more formal; new supervision and control organs are being formed and new laws are being studied, besides the currently existing ones.
We finally reach a conclusion typical of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo: let everything change so nothing will really change. We may hence reach the following conclusion: no spring-cleaning and no updating; chaos is an essential factor in leaving things unchanged; it is simply used as a change in power. Let us resign ourselves to the same leading figures, controllers and controlled parties, besides those who get into debt and whose career develops exponentially depending on the number of debts they succeed in adding to the budget of firms quoted in the stock exchange and in particular of State owned companies.
Let us browse through the pages we have already written and published on this matter in issues No.2 and 6/1987 of Leadership Medica to console ourselves by recollecting that we predicted it all and even put it down in writing. Let us resign ourselves to live in a context, which still conceals garbage under furniture and carpets! Translated by interpres sas