We now live, even though we are not fully aware of it, in the world of precision, reduced to figures, in which newborns already have a tax code. It is a world that counts the days, possessions and losses, positive and negative data, the quantities expressed in budgets and final balances. It is a measured, calculated, essentially numerical world. For the ancient Greeks, of whom today's Europeans are perhaps degenerate children, not being able to express a value in numerical terms was an occasion for joy. He approached us to pure thought, numerically incommensurable. Today's world experiences imprecision and unpredictability as a defeat. This is also why he degrades death to a technical accident.
Quality of life depends on gross domestic product, individual happiness on average per capita income. It is a withered world dominated by a planetary isomorphic tendency. It can only have the naked beauty of a stripped skull. Measure your progress solely in quantitative terms. She cannot stop, linger, reflect. Its capitalist form of production has only one driving force: private profit, the differential between the cost of production and the selling price, maximizing profit in the shortest possible time. So, increase production and squeeze wages; even, with robotization and electronics applied on a large scale, produce without workers. But then the short circuit between overproduction and underconsumption is triggered. It is no longer enough to produce the product. It will be necessary to produce the product and produce the consumer of the product. «More and more».
More, more and more. Development as pure, chaotic expansion. It's not just there transition from worker to operator, from the blue overalls to the white coat. We pass from the enmeshed society, dominated by the Web, to the saturnine society, which makes children and then devours them. Politics, faced with this situation, has no teeth. It moves from maximalism, revolutionary in words and impotent in reality, to the minimalism of petty reformism, which forgets the purpose of the journey along the way. We need a new social reformism, capable of taking small steps in politics without forgetting and, indeed, in the light of the great ideals of social equality and civil coexistence. Adriano Olivetti had glimpsed and attempted to implement this reformism, rigorous and reasonable at the same time. His attempt remains exemplary.
