The economic and social landscape around us is changing abruptly. We struggle to understand what is happening because our traditional reference points are no longer helpful. Without an up-to-date map of cultural transformations, and not just economic ones, we cannot build the future of Italy. Like a traveller using an outdated map, we struggle to orient ourselves, to find our way. Hence, the sense of bewilderment and discouragement that often grips us. We can now outline the new map of economic development, although - paralysed by indecisionism – we struggle to write it down. In this respect, the new executive led by Enrico Letta is aware that it has a fundamental challenge ahead of it: shaking off the image of a country ensnared by crossed vetoes, pulverised and (dis)articulated in its multiple corporate instances. A country capable of giving itself a glue, an ideality that unites. Able to draw a plausible future. However, a new economic map is a necessary factor, but not sufficient to build our future. Something else is missing, and we are seriously lagging behind: reflection on the cultural changes that have taken place in society, in the orientations and expectations of the population. What is missing is a map of the new value references that constitute the real engine of possible and expected change.
It is as if we live in a dissociated country, which has lost contact between its representatives and its voters, between the centre and the periphery. While a chunk of the country's ruling class seems to be unaware of what is happening outside its walls, society is experimenting on its own - good or bad - with new orders of values, new paths. It builds new value maps on its own. Thus, a distorted image of Italy emerges, where the premises of all possible policies are missing: the sharing of an idea, of a set of values around which to build the national community.
An example of the delay in this reflection on cultural transformations was highlighted in the previous instalment of the LaST Survey, where it emerged how a substantial part of the population no longer recognised itself in the traditional political categories of the 20th century, but was in search of new interpretative criteria. On this second occasion we address the value horizons that Italians would like in the future of Italy: a sort of political-value map to understand the expectations on the country they would like.
The picture that emerges well represents the complexity and, in some ways, certain paradoxes. We manifest an ideality of the country's future that is rooted in our tradition and with a good degree of agreement. But we seem to lack an institutional glue capable of containing it, where political cultures and values seem weak and scarcely able to reconnect them in a unitary design. On the other hand, we come from more than two decades of clash - and not confrontation - between different political fronts. Years of confrontations more often akin to stadium cheering, in which the institutions have not shown themselves well, nor have they had the capacity to develop a reflection on the transformations. As if time had stood still at the end of the last century, while the world all around has run at high speed. So, on the one hand, we would like an Italy with a welcoming and open social atmosphere, with a local and international identity at the same time, which finds its roots in territorial communities. On the other hand, the crisis seems to have affected everyday behaviour (drop in consumption) more than the value system that inspires it. There are orientations anchored to individualism and consumerism, a sort of creeping narcissism, rather than those inspired by sobriety and meritocracy. A de-institutionalised attitude towards politics is alive, where one wishes for a less invasive state and less party-mediated political participation. At the same time, however, the idea of a forward-looking policy hinged on a pro-European vision of our country is apparent.
A brief survey certainly cannot account for the profound cultural transformations sweeping our country. Nevertheless, it does tell of the need to update our cultural maps in order to read Italy more correctly. Above all, to give a common and more shared ideal horizon to our future.
