There is something …. there is something vibrant … there is something deep in the concept of Institutions … I just want to remember here the first lines of poetry by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italian film director, writer, poet, playwright 1922-1975) : “There is something so mysterious about institutions”
Beautiful fucking souls, for what else they will die
the two Kennedy brothers, if not
for an institution? …
What does the poet tell us here? Who are the fucking beautiful souls here? Why is he speaking bluntly? “The fucking beautiful souls” are those who feel like orphans, deny the existence of mothers, deny the existence of fathers, are those who would like to affirm their freedom against institutions, a freedom without sense of the limit. A freedom that does not know the “heritage” of their origin, the debt they have to some … when there are people who gave their lives for the Institutions …
The sense of gratitude towards father-mother … no human can self-generate. That of saying … “the past does not matter, I do as I please … is only a self-naughting (which is to say self-negating) perverse ghost because we all have a provenance. .. we all come into this world, how can I say, starting from someone who wanted us … desired us … or even casually generated us. All human beings are someone’s child and as such, they have a symbolic debt with their ancestors … with their roots … with their origin … but Pasolini tells us something even more profound …
There is something that is almost moving and mysterious in Institutions …. Institutions are not the opposite of poetry … there is something poetic in them … now, try to imagine evolution … human beings who build their environment and organize themselves with others … the transition from ape to man.
As I said, we usually have a gray image of Institutions … things like bureaucracy … administration … govern … anonymous conformity … routine … up to the unreachable “King” … the Leader – instead Pasolini is telling us to look carefully at the institutions and see in them the miracle that takes place .. and this miracle of organized life is far more mysterious than the miracle of individual life.
This miracle is the miracle of life together … of civil coexistence … of the collective life where individual freedom intersects with the experience of the community. The Institution is testimony to the possibility of creating this link between individual freedom and community life. But the institution is representative because it is represented by who represents it, and regardless of personal ideas, the Institution and who represents it are reflected in each other.
That’s precisely the reason why Quality of Leadership is fundamental in the Institutions.
There is a thing I want to say … it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the topic … but I am pretty sure that’s not true after all … you know, there are two words that are the cornerstone on which all St Paul’s preaching depends … they are faith and hope … well, I think that these two words without a third one … now, in the world we live in, would just express a blind and monstrous concept; because atrocious massacres took place in history in the name of faith and hope … terrible crimes were committed in the name of a bright future … So, I think maybe there is a third word we should add … Love … It is love that illuminates faith and hope as poetic words, not religious words … love for this world and the life we have.
Perhaps this will make you smile but I think that the life of Institutions … the govern … administration … leadership … call it whatever you want …in short, politics in general, especially at a high level … at the executive level, should be something damn serious that reflects love for this world and the life that we have. Not an asylum full of a bunch of ravenous (and often stupid) wolves that are only concerned for themselves and their ego.
I think that in the contemporary world, freedom has become really immune to choral participation … freedom wants nothing more to do with choral participation. It has become … something that from the body of freedom of society has turned into a good of the individual … it’s mine and I’ll do what I like with it … but no … we must strive to reconnect freedom at its first root: the community, the society. Freedom is the “singular” side of the community. It is the relationship that every individual has with the body of the community, which is society.
The thought that freedom is unlimited is destructive … An absolute freedom to say and do what one wants, and so much of the much-criticised political correctness, is a childish and terrible freedom … it is a freedom that does not take in due consideration the complex context in which it is placed. The law of freedom is not only that of not harming others … but it is above all that of creating intelligent freedom … conquering and keeping it within the frame of the Law of Man.
From this point of view, freedom and community-run along two parallel lines … they are inseparable, one is necessary to fully fulfil the other.
Transformation, for the worse.
In our time … in the time in which we live … especially in the last 40-50 years … freedom has become a kind of perverse unlimited personal “absolute” … and there is also another great “drift” that is assuming an ever-increasing importance … which is passion … not for freedom … passion for the “wall” … for the “border” … for closure … for defense … which is precisely something that political opportunists do to exploit dissatisfaction.
So we have these two extremes … on the one hand, the passion for freedom, understood as freedom without limits … and on the other, behaviors that are bringing back a sad sign of the 20th century … the symbol of wall … the symbol of the bastion … the symbol of the fortress … the symbol of the military garrison … the symbol of the border which gets tougher …instead of becoming softer in order to unite people.
Many want to turn our legitimate differences into a sharp barbed wire … fence … wall … of the mind, mostly.
These two extremes are two opposing forces. … On one hand we have “today’s program” which is made up of the “drive of the ego” – it is an autistic program. It has lost its grip on reality, like Autism … it tends to satisfy itself without taking into account the others.
On the other, there is the program of civilization which asks the “drive” to take into account the community, which, as if to say, imposes on the impulse to defer its satisfaction … tends to delimit the “instinct”. These two programs are antagonistic. They are incompatible. There is no harmony between them, but rather harsh conflict. The fact is that to live in the civilization of living together, you must also know how to live its discomfort, not fuel it. This applies to everyone. In all things of life. All the more so in the Institutions and in those who represent them.
In the great theater of life, the good guys are on the side of civilization and understanding – to be quite blunt, not on the side of the “f*ck off everybody, I do whatever the f*ck I want, all that matters is what I think and I don’t give a f*ck sh* about anyone”
That’s not how it is in life. It does not work out that way. And even more so when this is thought or made, tacitly or explicitly, by someone who represents Institution. In this case, such a behavior is an extremely worrying matter.
It is not because I say so … It is not because of written laws … but it is because this is THE LAW OF MAN.
