5,9% of Italians, about three million people, believe that Covid is an invention. Not only that: 10,9% think that the vaccine is useless, 5,8% are convinced that the Earth is flat and another 10% are sure that man has never landed on the moon. Even one in five of our compatriots (19,9%) claims that 5G is a technology designed to control minds. The data is contained in the 55th Censis Report on the country's social situation and provides an image of an Italy increasingly prone to irrationality.
“Why is this happening? – asks the Report – It is the indicator of something deeper: betrayed subjective expectations cause flight into magical thinking, witchcraft, shamanic, which claims to decipher the hidden meaning of reality. There is an unreasonable willingness to believe pre-modern superstitions, anti-scientific biases, unfounded theories and conspiracy speculation.
But be careful: this is not just a consequence of the pandemic. According to Censis, the irrational drift of a part of Italian society "has deep socioeconomic roots, following a parable that goes from rancor to psychic sovereignty, and which now evolves into the great rejection of rational discourse, that is, of the tools with which we have built progress and our well-being in the past: science, medicine, drugs, technologic innovations. This depends on the fact that we have entered the cycle of diminishing returns on social investments”.
DISSATISFACTION AND CHALLENGE
In essence, the escape into the irrational originates from unsatisfied personal expectations. And dissatisfaction, together with distrust, seems to be one of the most widespread sentiments in the country: "83,8% of Italians continue the Report - they believe that the commitment and results achieved in studies no longer shelter young people from from the risk of having to remain unemployed for a long time”. And again: "80,8% of Italians (especially young people: 87,4%) do not recognize a direct correlation between the commitment to training and the guarantee of having a stable and adequately remunerated job". A conviction linked to experience, given that in our country "almost a third of the employed have at most a middle school certificate".
POVERTY
To aggravate the picture is the economic situation of families, which has greatly worsened due to the pandemic. In 2020 there are about two million Italian families living in absolute poverty, more than double compared to 2010, when there were 980 thousand. The increase hit the North more heavily (+131,4%) than the Center (+67,6%) and the South (+93,8%). Of the families who fell into absolute poverty during the first year of the pandemic, 65% reside in the North, 21% in the South and 14% in the Centre.
PESSIMISM
And the prospects are not better for the future. On the contrary: "Only 15,2% of Italians believe that after the pandemic their economic situation will be better", while "for the majority (56,4%) it will remain the same and for a substantial 28,4% it will get worse". On the other hand, the trend towards impoverishment did not start with the pandemic: "In the last decade (2010-2020) the balance sheet of Italians has shrunk by 5,3% in real terms, as a result of the fall in the value of real assets (-17,0%), not offset by the growth of financial assets (+16,2%). The last ten years therefore mark a clear discontinuity with respect to the past: the upward race of real assets that has continued rapidly since the 80s has been interrupted. The reduction in assets, the result of the decrease in household gross income (-3,8% in real terms over the decade), shows how the ability of Italians to form new wealth has weakened”.
