by Giuseppe Castro
Could the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas? It is the title of a famous lecture by Edward Lorenz, who in the last century was among the first to understand and study how apparently irrelevant events can lead, after months or years, with initially unimaginable consequences. This “hypersensitivity” to the initial conditions, known as butterfly Effect, is applicable to all complex systems, such as the climate or the stock market, including the most complex system of all: human society. The understanding of history and human phenomena consequently translates into the search for all those events, apparently of secondary importance which, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, have led to consequences capable of changing forever the course of the lives of millions of people.
If we really want to understand what happens in Eastern Europe, understand theorigin of this huge tornado that is hitting Ukraine and Russia and indirectly across Europe, it is therefore essential to identify those butterflies that, twenty or thirty years ago, with their flapping of their wings, started the chain of events that it has brought us up to this present. Of course, this approach is not without its risks, because we may not like everything we might discover. For example, one might realize that although the military crisis (the tornado) was triggered by Putin’s Russia, some of the more remote causes (the flapping of butterflies’ wings) are to be found. even at homein the West.
A healthy democratic society should always be open to critical thinking, useful not only to find the necessary ideas to overcome the current crisis but also to prevent the same mistakes recur in the future. A public debate would therefore have been desirable to measure up to the situation in which we find ourselves. The main television and journalistic newspapers are, on the contrary, providing a bleak picture of Italian information. As if there were fear of going beyond a Manichean narrative of the war, various programs limit with maniacal accuracy the analysis of the thousand nuances of the conflict and its contextualization in the events of the last thirty years.
Trying to understand the enemy’s reasons, God avoid it, is not even taken into consideration. Indeed, in a sort of Italian-style neo-McCarthyism, anyone who tried to deepen the narrative of the war was considered pro-Putin, ending up purging some chatty commentators (Di Cesare and Orsini) and making them disappear from the video the correspondent Rai from Moscow, guilty of having explained the Russian point of view on the conflict (doing what he is paid for). On the columns of Republic even a surreal (and very serious) was published ban list edited by Gianni Riotta.
All this is at least disheartening. How can one expect to form an aware public opinion if the public service and the main newspapers prevent a discussion thorough on the causes of the conflict? The profound mission of journalism, to be the watchdog of democracy, should be implemented by explaining and re-explaining to the public what happens and why, so as to create a public opinion capable of appropriately influencing its representatives in parliament in the coming years and in the upcoming elections. . Turning on the TV and reading some newspapers, on the other hand, it seems that an outdated public opinion with a critical spirit does a lot fear. Thus the listener eager to understand what happens must be satisfied with a childish debate, reduced to the freedom to express thoughts (in) of pseudo common sense, moreover prepackaged from above. And the complexity of our world turns into a struggle of the gods good versus bad.
Why are we afraid of the “flapping of butterflies wings”? Posterity will judge.