Through tortuous paths and often strewn with traps and pitfalls, literary prizes almost always signal, in addition to the artistic value of the awarded work, the mood of the context in which we live, the deepest impulses of public opinion, that widespread culture, perhaps unconscious, which pushes the masses to see and interpret reality in a certain way, without taking into account rationality and logic. It is an underground wave, yet powerful, against which it is difficult to navigate. Often it arises from distorted interpretations of reality, from almost mythological visions of a happy past now lost, from the temptation to withdraw into oneself and look at one's navel, and above all from the "fear" of the future.
The Strega prize, awarded this year to Edoardo Nesi for his diary on the textile catastrophe in Prato, entitled "History of my people" well interprets the deep feeling of today's Italy: depressed, lost, afraid. The literary value of the work seems modest to me, with those somewhat scholastic quotations from great American authors and famous films, while it well represents the state of mind of Italians or perhaps what its intellectuals believe is in this historical monument the prevailing sentiment of our fellow citizens.
There are all the clichés that have occupied the hearts, even before the heads, of so many people and which are fueled by so much bad television journalism and so many weak-thinking intellectuals. Indeed, it seems certain that the "future will be worse than the present", that we have entered an irreversible spiral of "crisis, depression, poverty" and that, finally, all the fault lies with the politicians who "opened the borders to globalisation". thus destroying our small businesses which have been the real architects of Italian well-being in this post-war period.
Nesi tells the story of the Prato textile industry which has very ancient origins but which had a formidable development from the 50s to the mid 80s, when the Chinese competition began to make itself felt against which the fabrics of Prato they could compete. The author forgets to mention that the development of Prato, as well as that of many small Italian businesses, also depended on the creation of the European Community with the elimination of customs barriers which allowed access to important markets such as the German one. In short, globalization would have been a ruin and in fact Nesi takes it out on the professors who, starting with Giavazzi, pointed out the great opportunities that the opening of the markets could instead offer to Italian industry, provided it was capable of carrying out a leap both in size and in quality.
But the story went the way it did. What is impressive and what has left a sense of epochal frustration in the minds of our intellectuals is that these passages, although abrupt and which certainly could have been handled better, are felt as a sudden departure from a happy world, a kind of Eden, that we will never find again. Yet Nesi himself is an example of how individuals and countries can continually reinvent themselves to keep up with the times and to always reach new goals. He had to sell the family business (but he doesn't tell us if the new owners continue to run it with the profit he no longer had) but he has recycled himself as a writer and certainly successful, given that he won the Strega Prize ! It is certainly not little. Surely other colleagues of him will not have gone so well. Certainly many workers have lost their jobs. But they found other jobs or retired
and their children are educated at the University. Then, to make the picture more complicated and difficult to decipher, the Chinese arrived who rented the old sheds to make packages and where they make their Chinese compatriots work as slaves.
But we must ask ourselves why certain things have happened. It is certainly the fault of our politicians who have not had the ability to promote in time an evolution of our industry and workers towards specializations with higher added value. But as Nesi himself admits in some passages of his book, the responsibilities are much more widespread.
Nesi knows that Prato's industry has managed to thrive also thanks to widespread tax evasion, the distraction of the Public Administration on so many controls, a policy increasingly invited to take care of the affairs of one's "caste" without paying too much attention to directing the country as a whole. It is from this disorder that our inability to rationally face the invasion of the Chinese semi-slaves arises, which has made us find ourselves unprepared in the face of the opening of the markets, which makes it very difficult to undermine the enormous pockets of inefficiency especially in the sector public, which make us progressively lose competitiveness not only towards the Chinese, but also towards other European countries such as France and Germany. It is impressive that of all these rational reasoning based on serious scientific research and conducted by internationally renowned scholars, there are very few left traces in the book of Nesi. Certainly the author in the end, speaking with a fellow entrepreneur, admits that the crisis "is also our fault that we thought we could go on indefinitely doing the job of our fathers as if it were an acquired and untouchable right, that we deluded ourselves that we being able to sell the same fabrics they produced in the third millennium, and sell them to the usual customers in the same markets”.
But it is a belated admission which does not give rise to a strong will to look ahead, to invent new things to imitate what grandparents and fathers were able to do sixty years ago. One prefers to abandon oneself to "loss", one feels on a small boat in the middle of a stormy sea, without having the strength to fight against the waves by making use of the undoubted ability to navigate in rough waters that we should have acquired by now, if only by following the example of the generations that preceded us who certainly did not have to overcome difficulties inferior to ours.
It is clear that then, going down to the more concrete terrain of everyday life, we have to think and perhaps argue about what could be the best way out of the storm. We can criticize the government maneuver because it doesn't cut spending and introduces too many new taxes. But we must do it with a different spirit than that of the simple conservation of what little we have (and which in any case is automatically eroded by the crisis). We have to believe that we can start growing again; that the future will not necessarily be worse than the past; and that the economy does not indicate inevitable destinies but can be won by "an act of the imagination". In short, the will of man is the real spring that drives the index of the economy.
