A journey beyond fear, to understand how this epidemic is changing our freedom, our rights, our democracy.
“While power attacks the virus, the virus has already affected the power. It is not the one that changes, as we feared in our worst nightmares: in fact it is changing us and the relationship between citizens and State.”
Modernity has accustomed us to look at death as a senseless, incongruous event. Instead an unknown pathogen forced us calculate every day who lives and who dies. But every diagram, every count that seems to reveal the secret of this misfortune, has actually a double meaning, it tells something about the virus and about us, and the balance is the amount of our daily fear. To escape evil, we hid ourselves, taking shelter, abandoning social relations to imprison ourselves within the walls of our homes. Meanwhile a second, invisible infection was spreading silently, and nobody knows yet how many victims it will do: it is an infection that transfers the fear from the health situation to the social organization. The virus seems to make inadequate what we used to consider a conquest, it goes straight to the heart of the system and attacks the democratic mechanism, it proposes a new and different power, based on anomaly as a necessity. So the infection is transforming not only social relationships, but also our freedom, our work and our rights: in a word, it’s transforming politics. For this reason, even if we were all the same in the beginning of the pandemic, we risk coming out it very different.
Ezio Mauro tells the path of the virus since it was born in China until today, studying its tactics, strategy and character. In the meantime, he reflects on us, on how we are changing.
“We are victims of a universal attack that for the first time threatens the whole human race, and at the same time we are protagonists of an unprecedented social experiment: we will come out different, I have tried to understand how and how much.”
