Who would you vote for now?

In the mare magnum of the net, in the last few days, an interesting film has been circulating: technically well done, well interpreted and, in hindsight, full of meanings so pregnant that they sprout over time in the mind with their thousand why: in short, a brief but intense union in which semiology and semantics draw myriads of thoughts and arguments from the darkness. In a classroom full of students, of young people who come to life, a teacher, after having illustrated for each one the peculiar and salient characteristics of three possible but unknown candidates, proposes to a student, and then to her entire class, a question: who to vote for?

The question appears rhetorical: the first two candidates are nothing but a jumble of defects that can only lead to the choice, one would say obliged, of the third. The first two unpresentable are FD Roosevelt and W. Churchill; the third, the candidate to whom the votes should be channeled, is none other than Hitler. The obvious conclusion is that the "the world is never as we imagine it", And that perhaps in Little Red Riding Hood even the wolf could, with good reason, carve out a slice of credibility, enough to appear, not so bad.

Jessica rabbit docet: the fault is not his but of whoever designs it. The main flaw, which can be corrected in a class of adolescents, much less in contexts of greater importance, for example in an executive, is that today's society is made up of a poor amalgam, with a zest bewitching and easy to grasp, but completely devoid of depth, of perspective. After all, think it's hard to be consistent too binding.

In the USA, in 2013, the film American Hustle - Appearances can be deceiving (frame), narrated the real events of the operation abscam, aimed at targeting rampant corruption in Congress and other government organizations; excellent film, excellent cast, nominations for multiple awards with strong effect, but no concrete recognition. It is inevitable to think that the topics covered, so strong and, in their brutality, disqualifying for a people inspired, evidently only verbally, by a manifest destiny and from a messianic duty to teach others the bean and rava from the top of hundreds of various steps of a sometimes questionable superiority complex, they have struck a bundle of bare and aching nerves.

Of course, not that the feedbacks have produced lasting effects: the Iraqi invasion, based on incontrovertible evidence of the possession of prohibited weapons, which was not so evident in the end, gives us a further sample of how reliability and credibility they must necessarily and perennially be tested.

Cicero, pragmatic rhetorician and adept at the most complex political exercises, wrote clearly: they quam videri¹; to remember politically, however, the corruption of the principle that makes Machiavelli of it Prince, which by flipping the sentence into saw them as they were², unknowingly it has thrown open the halls of power over the centuries to the most dangerous populist barkers.

But who confers the credibility? Gioacchino Rossini, in his Barber of Seville, tells us that the slander is a breeze, a very gentle auretta; today we would talk more smoothly than cognitive war. After all, it seems really impossible to find, practically everywhere, an electoral campaign free from mutual launches of guano.

In 1960, on the occasion of the presidential campaign, Nixon, opposed to Kennedy, his honesty was questioned by resorting to a provocative comparison, which was substantiated by the slogan would you buy a car from this man?; However, two aspects should be noted: the first is based on the proactivity of an effective communication staff³, the second that Nixon's subsequent rehabilitation as a potential car dealership fell miserably on the rocks of the Watergate scandal.

Even the good Lewis Carroll has addressed the issue with his Alice and his passage from the real world to that of wonders; who hasn't fallen at least once in the rabbit hole? Who hasn't had tea with the Mad Hatter without being mesmerized by the Cheshire Cat? While everything appears tinged with a seductive note of madness, the Hatter tells Alice: “Too bad you stop at appearances… otherwise I would have given you a lift".

Just a child's play? Not at all. In Clausewitz with diction fog of war you try to grasp the uncertainty about your own abilities, those of the opponent; everything is aimed at thinning out the fog, to confer credibility: war, in all its meanings, is the realm of the most dangerous uncertainty, unless yes games, according to the model of Admiral Tirpitz, with his Risiko Gedanken, that is a risk theory, an analysis to be considered part of game theory, according to which, if the imperial fleet had reached a certain level of power in comparison with the English one, London would have tried to avoid the confrontation, in accordance with the idea of fleet in existence.

Another historical unpredictability, yet more than real, has become consubstantiated in the outcome of the Arab - Israeli wars: starting from 1948, who would have bet on the survival of the very young state of Ben Gurion? Nobody. Defeating the evidence and the Manichaeism of the most popular cognac, table and dice strategists, the result was instead the nakba⁴ Arab, and the consolidation of Jerusalem, albeit in a framework that, despite the time that has passed, still appears magmatic and very useful in the exercise of the evaluation of credibility and appearances.

In cauda venenum: we purposely left the more strictly political evaluations in the final.

“Philosophy implies a free mobility of thought, it is a creative act that dissolves ideologies.⁵" We like to think that this principle can be accompanied by the thought of Max Weber, as expressed in his essay Politics as a profession, in which the essential concepts of his research on the definition of the state were reiterated with the classification of the foundations of legitimacy of power.

Weber is not interested in the contents of political action, but only in general question of what politics is and what it can mean as a profession, where "politics" refers "only to the direction or influence exercised on the leadership of a political group, that is - today - of a state". Power is therefore based on three legitimacies, in particular on the one that passes through charismatic authority, unfortunately often linked to pure demagogy, that particular stigma that is pronounced, with a frown and founded on the void filled with nothingness, which the situation is serious but not serious.

One can live for politics, as one can live for politics; that is, one can live by drawing the main and increasingly often the only income, or live the flowing passion of convictions capable of giving meaning to life itself. However, now, even in our country, there is a dramatic lack of foundations: of passion, of a sense of responsibility, of foresight, with on the contrary an excess of vanity, which leads to aspiring to power for power itself, of nonsense, in a current and unsolvable irreconcilability between politics and the ethics of responsibility.

There is no doubt that anyone who does not have the slightest aptitude for achieving practical results is completely unable to even glimpse the possibility of serving a sensible cause.

Let's be honest: raise your hand who, in recent years, has found, beyond the most vulgar and ridiculous appearances, the substantiality of passion as dedication to god or demon that animates an objective cause, responsibility and farsightedness as a targeted and sensible perception of the future consequences of one's actions according to an ethic of ideals and responsibility not based on the emptiness of public appearances devoid of any dignity policy.

How not to agree with Ernesto Galli della Loggia, when he states that "what is happening in these days shows once again the paucity, the lack of courage and vision, the indecision, in a word the political inconsistency, of the Italian party universe. It is the result of a thirty-year phenomenon: of the cultural catastrophe that has hit the political class of our country, causing a frightening lowering of quality ... There is the experience and cultural formation of individuals, there is the biography of those who in the for the last thirty years they have held the office of parliamentarians or ministers of the Republic. It is in this direction that the gaze should be directed, starting with a comparison with the past"?

Where the protest ends for lack of valid reasons and above all for the chronic lack of bases, it is fatally destined to return to the stables of the Animal Farm, where all are equal but some are more equal than others, and where the swine intelligentsia renounces the revolutionary ideals of conformity, ease and comfort human, too human.

According to Plutarch, the thirst for freedom, if satisfied by cupbearers who aim to drunk the people, can only lead to tyranny, and to the death of politics for politics. The hope remains that, as in the film The lives of others, there is always a Captain Wiesler who notices the distortions, and a playwright Dryman who writes his Sonata for good men.

Who would you vote for now? The Weber, the Wiesler, the Dryman, or a more captivating barker? Think about it; you are not in class, your life is at stake in this immense one Farm.