For some time now I've had the feeling that freedom is taken away not only through prohibitions, but also through an excess of stimuli. Attention is continually fragmented, the imagination saturated, inner time occupied by an incessant flow of images, information and reactions. In this permanent noise it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish what we truly choose from what we have been induced to desire, think or fear.
It is from this unease that my interest in the study of psychological warfare, propaganda and techniques of cultural influence was born. Not with the intent of offering definitive truths, but of better understanding the processes through which consent is formed, the collective imagination is oriented and, at times, the very boundaries of what a society considers thinkable are redefined.
This is the first of a series of articles dedicated to these themes, with which I would like to open a space for research and discussion, in the conviction that understanding the mechanisms of influence is one of the necessary conditions for preserving freedom of thought.
The systematic demoralization of populations represents, in my view, one of the principal strategies of influence in the contemporary world.
Today power is exercised not primarily through military force, but by intervening over the long term in culture, education, information, the arts and historical memory, to the point of altering how an entire generation interprets reality and reacts to events.
«It takes only fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation.»
This is the minimum time needed to shape a new generation, educating it from infancy within a given system of values, cultural references and interpretive categories.
"The deepest transformation does not consist in imposing new ideas, but in making precise messages subconscious."
When this process reaches maturity, it is no longer necessary for influence to be exerted constantly from outside: citizens themselves spontaneously reproduce and reinforce the cultural paradigm in which they grew up.
It is at this stage that facts progressively lose the capacity to change convictions. Documents, evidence, testimonies and data are no longer evaluated as such, but reinterpreted through an already consolidated mental structure. The problem does not concern the availability of information, but the cultural filter through which it is understood.
Meanwhile, that same generation progressively reaches the places where power is formed: governments, public administrations, universities, schools, large corporations, the media, the cultural industry and institutions. Once installed in decision-making centers, it inevitably tends to perpetuate the same patterns of thought with which it was educated.
This is the reason why great cultural changes take about twenty years. Not because a society suddenly changes its mind, but because the generation occupying the positions from which knowledge is produced, consent is built and decisions are made, changes.
Contemporary war is therefore fought above all on the terrain of culture, information and the collective imagination. The objective is not to conquer a territory, but to orient how a population interprets its own history, present and future.
From this perspective, I consider postwar Italy one of the principal laboratories of Western cultural influence. US geopolitical hegemony, the spread of mass culture and the growing role of the major information and entertainment industries progressively contributed to building a collective imagination consistent with the West's strategic and military interests.
In my judgment, this process also produced a form of cultural subalternity. Over the decades, a significant part of Italian society progressively internalized a perception of inferiority toward the American model, adopting its languages, values, cultural references and interpretive categories to the point of considering them universal.
The result was not only political, but anthropological. Generation after generation, social conflict was progressively absorbed by the market; rebellion was transformed into language, aesthetics and consumption. Even movements born as radical experiences of protest were progressively reabsorbed within economic and cultural dynamics compatible with the dominant system.
The most effective propaganda, in fact, is not the kind that imposes a truth by force. It is the kind that defines the very perimeter of the thinkable. It does not tell people what to think; it establishes which questions are considered legitimate and which, instead, become unthinkable.
When this happens, demoralization is complete. A society does not only lose the capacity to oppose power: it progressively loses the capacity to imagine alternatives.
