When Adorno and Horkheimer , illustrious pessimists, insisted on summarizing the disaster of all this they turned to The Odyssey . After all, nothing like a shipwreck to illustrate another shipwreck. In the opinion of the philosophers of Frankfurt, the desire for dominion and arrogance that define the Enlightenment imply a self-alienation not very different from that experienced or, better, exercised on himself by Odysseus when in the XII song he decides to tie himself to the stick of his concave ship to resist the song of the Naiads . The attempt to break the dreaded power of nature (represented by the sirens) led "to a deeper enslavement of thought; hence the course of European civilization." Goodbye. Both the cunning Greek and their sailors, the apocalyptic duo continues, were freed from their most intimate limitations by resorting to self-discipline and in doing so reduced human reason to a coercive instrument to dominate nature itself and themselves. After several laps (the allegories give what they give), sad thinkers end up making Odysseus the first bourgeois hero unable to act according to another pattern other than the myopic calculation of losses and benefits. And that at the expense of himself, of his individuality and of everything that surrounds him and us. A step further, instrumental rationality, in addition to giving us a gleaming iPhone, appears as the gateway to all the horrors of the twentieth century and those that follow . No one said that thinking was free.

It is not clear to me if Homer , blind but clairvoyant, was thinking about all this when from the Daskalopetra on the island of Chios he recalled in the eighth century BC the feats of the hero of a thousand tricks. Nor if, if the reasoning of the Frankfurt were correct, he would have continued dictating his verses to what he was involuntarily causing. Just as uncertain it is to me what would have happened to him if the parents of his students had preferred the useful English to the dying Greek. What seems even more unlikely is that the rapsoda accepted without more the arrogant display of cynicism, arrogance, stupidity disguised as Salvini and calculation by cruel force of benefits as spurious as the electorate in the desperate situation of the last shipwrecked of our very human, instrumental and thorough civilization. It is not that we do not care what happens to them, it is worse: we have made them the news of summer (or a Twitter thread).

We believe that the shipwrecked are them, but the ones that sink are us. Without remedy and without ornaments.

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