Making Peace with Your Shadow

Pain, at least to a great extent, is self-inflicted. Not in the simplistic sense that we are always the architects of our own suffering, because life contains illness, grief, injustice, betrayal, accidents, and circumstances we never chose and that can strike us without warning. Pain becomes self-inflicted when, on top of the original wound, we build a second layer of suffering around it: relentless self-judgment, remorse, recrimination, and the obsessive question of what we could have done differently.

This is where the past becomes a prison.

Our choices, in fact, never emerge from nowhere. They are the product of the trajectory that came before them. Our beliefs, our fears, the way we interpret the world, what we consider possible or impossible, the people we trust and those we distrust, even the way we imagine our future—all of these are the result of a long accumulation of experiences. Whenever we make a choice, we carry this invisible inheritance with us.

That is why every life is truly unique and unrepeatable. Even the lives of identical twins, who may be nearly indistinguishable in appearance and share the same genetic makeup, will never be exactly the same life. All it would take is for one of them to meet someone the other never met, for one to receive a job offer the other never received, or for one to be in a particular room when something decisive happens while the other is somewhere else. From that moment on, their trajectories would slowly begin to diverge.

The family we are born into is already a first lottery. So is geography. So is historical time. Even the moment of our birth matters. A child born into a financially secure and culturally stimulating family starts from a different position than one born into poverty, conflict, or a broken home. A young person born in a major city will encounter different opportunities and people from someone born in a small town. Someone entering the workforce during a period of economic expansion encounters possibilities that are different from those available to someone turning twenty during a recession.

And then there are the people we meet.

A person we encounter by chance can change an entire life. A teacher can convince us that we are capable of doing something we had never imagined. A friend can take us somewhere where we meet the person who will become our spouse. A colleague can introduce us to someone who offers us the job of our life. But the opposite is also true: we can meet the wrong person at the wrong time and spend years trying to escape the consequences of that encounter.

How much of all this can we really control?

And yet, when we reach fifty and look back, we tend to tell ourselves the story of our lives as though we had once possessed a complete map. As though every crossroads had been clearly marked. As though we had known that a particular phone call would matter, that a certain person would betray us, that a company would fail, that a relationship would end, that an opportunity would never come again.

But we didn't know.

And this is precisely where what economists and decision theorists call bounded rationality comes into play: human beings make decisions based on the information available to them, their cognitive abilities, the time they have, and the emotional context in which they find themselves. We do not possess perfect knowledge of the future. We are not omniscient. We cannot calculate every consequence of every decision.

Every choice, therefore, is made inside a cone of shadow.

And regret often begins when we forget that.

Imagine a twenty-five-year-old man who turns down an opportunity to move abroad because he wants to stay close to his family. At fifty, he looks back at his life and discovers that the foreign company he turned down has become a multinational corporation, while the colleagues who left have built extraordinary careers. He might tell himself: “I was an idiot. If I had left, I would have a house abroad, more money, and a completely different career.”

But there is a trick hidden inside that reasoning.

The twenty-five-year-old did not know the future of the company. He did not know it would become a multinational. He did not know that some of his colleagues would succeed. He did not even know whether he himself would succeed. All he knew was that, at that moment, he had a family he was deeply attached to and that leaving seemed like too great a risk.

The fifty-year-old is judging his twenty-five-year-old self using information that the younger man could not possibly have possessed.

It is a profoundly unfair process.

The same thing happens in romantic relationships. How many people, after a marriage or relationship ends, torment themselves by saying, “I should have realized sooner who that person really was”? But how could they have? At the beginning of a relationship, we never completely know another person. We know what the other person shows us and what we are capable of seeing. Some behaviors are interpreted differently because we are in love, because we trust, because we need the relationship to work.

Then something happens.

A sentence, a betrayal, a decision, a sudden change in behavior illuminates, in retrospect, even episodes that had previously seemed insignificant.

“It was all obvious.”

No. Often it wasn't obvious at all. It became obvious afterward.

That difference is enormous.

The same applies to career decisions. We may remain for years in a place that is slowly consuming us and later blame ourselves for not having had the courage to leave sooner. But perhaps ten years earlier we had two young children, a mortgage, financial insecurity, and no concrete alternative. What looks like cowardice today may, from that person's perspective at the time, have been a form of responsibility.

This does not mean it was necessarily the best choice. It simply means that we should judge it by considering the information, constraints, and responsibilities that existed at that particular moment.

The same is true of missed opportunities.

How many times do we tell ourselves, “I should have tried”?

I should have written that book. I should have confessed my feelings. I should have taken that job. I should have moved away. I should have studied harder. I should have started that business. I should have returned that phone call. I should have said yes.

Maybe.

But every “I should have” conceals a question we rarely ask ourselves: What did I know then?

Because the decision was not made by the person we are today. It was made by the person we were back then, with his fears, his beliefs, his inexperience, and his needs.

This is why regret can become a sophisticated form of retrospective narcissism: we imagine that our past self should have been smarter, braver, more farsighted, and stronger than it was actually possible for him to be.

We demand from ourselves a better version of who we were, as though that version had always been available.

It wasn't.

This, however, does not mean that every behavior should be forgiven or relativized. There is a fundamental difference between understanding a choice and justifying it.

There are actions that can be recognized as morally wrong even before we know their outcome. Deliberately harming an innocent person, knowingly betraying someone who trusts us, exploiting another person's vulnerability, torturing, persecuting, or killing for personal gain do not become good actions simply because we later find an explanation for them.

The complexity of circumstances does not erase responsibility.

The same applies to collective actions.

A government may order its soldiers to kill people it considers enemies and may call that action “necessary,” “legitimate,” “patriotic,” or “defensive.” But changing the name of an act does not automatically change its moral nature. Political and legal responsibility can be complex; propaganda can construct competing narratives; the reasons put forward by the opposing sides may be radically different. But the fact that an action has been authorized by an authority does not mean that every individual act committed within it is morally innocent.

So this is not about saying that “everything is relative.”

It is about making distinctions.

There are mistakes we make because we did not know the future. There are mistakes we make because we misjudged a situation. There are mistakes made under pressure. There are mistakes made out of fear. And there are actions we know are wrong and choose to commit anyway.

Putting everything into the same category means giving up on understanding human responsibility.

Perhaps we should also begin to look at our wounds differently.

A wound is an opening through which pain enters, but it can also become a slit, a narrow opening through which we can glimpse what might have been.

The word “slit” seems particularly appropriate to me because the past always contains an alternative possibility. A life is not only what happened; it is also the sum of everything that could have happened but never did.

We could have married someone else.

We could have lived in another city.

We could have had a different career.

We could have had more children—or none.

We could have made more money.

We could have written that book.

We could have said those words.

We could have remained silent.

We could have left.

We could have stayed.

Every real life is surrounded by an enormous constellation of possible lives that never became real.

And that is precisely what makes growing older so difficult.

We do not suffer only because of what we have lost. Sometimes we suffer because of the people we never became.

The doctor we never became. The writer we never had the courage to be. The entrepreneur we gave up on becoming. The person who might have lived in another city. The father we might have been. The woman or man we might have loved.

They are ghosts without bodies, and precisely because of that, they can become perfect.

Real life is full of flaws. The alternative life we imagine, on the other hand, never had the chance to fail.

It is a life constructed with hindsight.

Perhaps that is why regret can be so cruel: we compare a real life, full of mistakes, with an imaginary life to which we have granted nothing but success.

But we have no idea how that alternative life would have turned out.

The person we did not marry might have betrayed us. The job we did not take might have destroyed us. The city we did not move to might have made us miserable. The book we never wrote might have been a failure. The investment we never made might have cost us everything.

The past we imagine is often a carefully selected past.

We remember what we might have gained and forget what we might have lost.

And perhaps there comes a moment in life when we have to stop asking the past to give back what it can no longer give.

We cannot go back.

We can only change our relationship with what happened.

Making peace with your shadow does not mean absolving yourself of everything. It means ceasing to be your own jailer.

It means being able to look at a wrong decision and say, “Yes, it was a wrong decision.”

But also: “Back then, I didn't know what I know today.”

It means looking at the person we once were without hating him because he failed to live up to the person we wished we could have been.

It means recognizing that, at certain moments, we did the best we were capable of doing, while at other moments we could have done better and didn't.

Both things can be true at the same time.

Perhaps maturity consists precisely in being able to hold these two truths together without turning either one into self-absolution or self-flagellation.

I was wrong.

I shouldn't have done it.

I could have done things differently.

But also:

I couldn't have known everything.

I didn't yet know what I would eventually learn.

I was a different person from the one I am today.

And finally:

I tried.

That seemingly ordinary sentence could become one of the most important sentences of our old age.

I tried.

I loved as well as I knew how to love.

I worked with the tools I had.

I raised my children with what I knew at the time.

I pursued some opportunities and let others go.

I was afraid.

I was brave.

I trusted the wrong people.

I wasted time.

I started over.

I won sometimes and lost many other times.

Not every doughnut came out with a hole.

But tormenting ourselves over the ones that came out wrong will not put them back in the oven.

And above all, it will not give back the years we spent punishing ourselves.

Perhaps this is the real danger of remorse: not the pain caused by what happened, but the transformation of the past into a permanent sentence.

A mistake can last a day, a year, even a lifetime in its consequences.

But the trial against that mistake can last even longer, because we are simultaneously the defendant, the judge, the prosecutor, and the jailer.

And so we risk spending our old age in hell not because of what we did, but because of what we continue to do to ourselves because of what we did.

Perhaps, at some point, we have to lay down our weapons.

Look at our shadow.

Recognize it.

Do not deny it.

Do not idealize it.

Simply accept that the person we once were was also us.

And then turn toward whatever stretch of road remains.

Because the past can explain our trajectory, but it does not necessarily have to become our destination.

The true act of reconciliation with ourselves, then, does not consist in saying, “I didn't do anything wrong.”

It consists in being able to say:

“I was wrong. I suffered. I learned. And now, finally, I can stop punishing myself.”

What Is God, Really? When Human Beings Try to Define the Absolute

A few evenings ago, while talking with a friend, we arrived at a question that seems to have accompanied humanity from the very beginning and that, precisely because of this, we tend to take for granted: what is God, really? Not who God is according to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the countless religious traditions human beings have developed over thousands of years, but what God actually is, beyond our representations, our symbols, our doctrines, and even our words.

The distinction is enormous, because when we ask, “Who is God?” we are already operating within a relationship, a narrative, a tradition. We can answer that He is the Father, the Creator, the Supreme Being, the One, the Absolute, Love, the Trinity, the God of Abraham, or the God proclaimed by Jesus. But when we ask what God is, the question changes completely, because we are immediately confronted with the limits of human knowledge itself. We are finite beings trying to understand the infinite; we are immersed in time and attempting to think about what is supposed to exist beyond time; we are part of the universe and yet try to understand what, according to our own definitions, would be its origin and foundation.

So I find myself wondering: are we really sure that the categories through which we think about God are adequate to God?

The problem is not only God, but man

Perhaps the question of God cannot be approached without first passing through an even more difficult question: what is a human being?

It sounds like a simpler question because we have direct experience of ourselves. Yet it only takes a moment of reflection to realize how difficult it is to answer. We can say that a human being is what he thinks, what he does, what he desires, what he loves, what he creates, what he remembers, what he dreams. We can define humanity through reason, consciousness, language, or the ability to create culture and art. But every definition inevitably captures only a part.

We might say, for example, that a human being is what he does. It is an attractive definition and, to some extent, a convincing one. We reveal ourselves through our works: music, literature, science, technology, religion, war, architecture, politics, love. But is that enough to define us? Obviously not. Human beings build cathedrals and atomic bombs; they write love poems and organize wars; they save lives and can, at the same time, destroy other human lives. If we define humanity through what human beings do, we obtain an image of humanity, but not necessarily its essence.

And this is where a word that may seem unnecessarily technical becomes useful: synecdoche. We take a part and use it to represent the whole. The problem is that when we speak about humanity and then use humanity as a means of speaking about God, we risk constructing what might be called a synecdoche of synecdoches: one part of the human being becomes the whole human being, and that partial image of humanity then becomes, in turn, our image of God.

At that point, we may have the impression that we have found an answer, when perhaps all we have done is multiply our representations.

Is the God we name really God?

This, to me, is one of the fundamental problems of every religion.

We cannot speak about God except through human language. We call Him Father because we know what it means to be a father; we call Him Creator because we know what it means to create; we call Him Judge because we know what judgment is; we call Him Love because we have experienced love. Even when we use apparently more abstract terms such as Absolute, Infinite, or Being, we are still using concepts created by the human mind.

That does not necessarily mean they are false. It means they are ours.

And I think that distinction is crucial.

When someone says, “God is love,” are they necessarily telling us something about God, or are they telling us something about their own understanding of love and, through that understanding, attempting to approach God? When we call God Father, are we describing a reality we know directly, or are we using a human metaphor to indicate something we cannot otherwise define?

I do not think these questions destroy faith. On the contrary, they might make faith much more conscious, because they force believers to distinguish between God and the image of God they have constructed.

And the same distinction applies to those who do not believe.

Because even an atheist, when saying that he does not believe in God, must first establish which God he is rejecting. The personal God of a particular religion? The Creator God of classical metaphysics? An anthropomorphic God who intervenes in history? The Absolute of philosophers? The God of Christian tradition? Rejecting one representation of God does not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of everything that the word “God” has attempted, throughout history, to indicate.

And what about Jesus?

The issue becomes even more delicate when we arrive at Jesus, because we are no longer dealing merely with a philosophical concept, but with a historical person around whom one of the greatest religious experiences in human history developed.

My friend reminded me of something that I consider far from insignificant: Jesus speaks of the Father, speaks of unity, speaks about the relationship between human beings and God, and, above all, makes statements that Christianity has come to regard as extraordinary. But precisely here, I think, we need to distinguish the historical Jesus from the theological development that subsequently grew around his figure.

I am not saying that Christian theology is false. I am saying that it is something different from simply recording the words of a man who lived two thousand years ago.

When we read the New Testament, after all, we are not listening to a recording of every word Jesus ever spoke. We are reading texts that emerged within the earliest Christian communities, were transmitted and interpreted within those communities, and eventually became part of the tradition of the Church. Paul of Tarsus played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity and in its theological development, but he did not know Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. The councils of the following centuries then formulated fundamental doctrines concerning the nature of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures.

All of this belongs to the history of Christianity and cannot simply be erased. But precisely because it belongs to history, it should remind us that there is a historical process between Jesus and the theological image of Jesus, and that this process deserves to be studied and understood.

In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is an immense statement, but it is not the same thing as literally saying, “I am God.” Christianity has interpreted this and other statements in light of the whole story of Jesus, his death, the resurrection believed in by his disciples, and the subsequent reflection of Christian communities. The divinity of Christ is therefore not simply the result of one isolated sentence, but of an entire theological construction based on the interpretation of his person and his life.

And here, personally, I find the question more interesting than the answer.

What did his first disciples see in that man that led them to recognize in him something beyond a man?

It is a fascinating question even if, for a moment, we put faith aside.

Perhaps art knows something reason cannot express

Art also came up in our conversation, and I don't think that was incidental.

Art has a peculiar quality: it can often suggest what it cannot explain. Music can communicate something that cannot be translated into a definition; a painting can make us perceive a dimension of existence that no description could completely reproduce; poetry can connect experiences that ordinary language would otherwise keep apart.

Perhaps this is also why religions have always needed art. When reason reaches something it can no longer contain through precise concepts, symbols, parables, rituals, images, and songs appear.

Not necessarily because the symbol is more truthful than reason, but because sometimes a symbol can point toward something that reason cannot fully circumscribe.

An arrow is not the thing toward which it points.

Perhaps much of religious language works in precisely this way: it does not necessarily claim to be the object itself; it attempts to point toward it.

The problem begins when we forget the distinction and turn the arrow into the target.

The temptation of dogma

This is where, paradoxically, I think both traditional religion and certain forms of esotericism and Gnosticism can fail.

Historically, Gnosticism emerged through many different movements and experiences, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single system. Yet whenever the idea of a higher knowledge becomes the conviction that one finally possesses the key to the Absolute, the risk is that one dogma is simply being replaced by another.

The priest says, “The truth is this.”

The initiate answers, “No, the true knowledge is this.”

But if both believe they have definitively possessed something that no finite being should be able to possess in its entirety, the distance between them may be much smaller than they imagine.

The words change, the symbols change, the hierarchies change, the sacred books change, but the temptation remains the same: to turn a possible path toward the Absolute into the Absolute itself.

And this is where, in my view, humility should enter the picture.

Not the humility of someone who gives up searching, but the humility of someone who continues searching while knowing that every answer may contain only a fragment of the truth.

Perhaps the problem lies in our very concept of “existence”

There is an even more radical question.

We ask whether God “exists,” but what does it mean to exist?

A tree exists. A person exists. A galaxy exists. An atom exists. These are realities that we can, at least to some degree, place within space and time and subject to different forms of observation.

But if God is truly what some philosophical traditions call the Absolute, the foundation of being itself, can we use the same concept of existence for God that we use for things that are part of the universe?

Perhaps the question itself is badly framed.

It is somewhat like asking where the origin of space is located. The question appears meaningful because we are accustomed to thinking that everything must be “somewhere.” But if we are speaking about space as a whole, that “where” no longer has its ordinary meaning.

Likewise, if God were that upon which being itself depends, asking whether God “exists” in the same sense in which a thing exists might mean applying a category to something for which that category was never designed.

This is not a proof of God's existence.

But neither is it a proof of His nonexistence.

It is simply an acknowledgment of a conceptual limit.

Perhaps the most honest answer is a question

In the end, perhaps the real issue is not finding a better definition of God, but understanding why human beings have always felt the need to ask the question in the first place.

Why have human beings, in every civilization we know, looked beyond themselves?

Why have they built temples, prayed, sacrificed, painted gods on cave walls, written prayers, developed cosmologies, invented myths, and searched for a meaning that extended beyond their individual existence?

We could explain all of this as fear of death, the need for order, the desire for consolation, social construction, or psychological illusion. Some of these explanations may certainly capture part of the phenomenon. But even then we return to the original problem: we have explained one manifestation of humanity, not necessarily its essence.

And so we are back where we started.

What is a human being?

And through the human being, what can we really know about God?

Perhaps not much.

Perhaps far more than we imagine.

But certainly not everything.

That is why I am less interested in deciding which religion has “won” the contest for truth and more interested in observing the mechanism through which human beings construct their certainties, because that may be where the greatest error is hidden: confusing what we have understood with what actually exists.

The word “God” is ours. The symbols are ours. The theologies are ours. The philosophies are ours. Even the concept of the Absolute is formulated by our minds.

And so the question remains, apparently simple and perhaps impossible:

What is God, really, once we remove everything human beings have said about God?

I do not know whether there is an answer.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

As long as we continue searching without turning every intuition into a dogma, we remain within the search.

The moment we believe we have finally possessed the Absolute, perhaps we have stopped searching for God and simply begun worshiping one of our own representations of Him.

The Donkey Climbing the Stairs

When merit isn't enough

Every society teaches its children that ability matters.

Work hard. Prepare yourself. Do your best. If you are good enough, you will have a chance.

Then, sooner or later, many of us discover the uncomfortable truth: merit can open a door, but it does not always decide who gets through it.

Sometimes the door opens for the person who knows someone.

Sometimes it stays closed for the person who was better prepared.

Sometimes the rules are followed exactly as written—and yet the outcome still feels profoundly unfair.

That realization can arrive early in life. Mine did.

I was eight years old.

The story behind the poem

Two boys I knew had attended the same school. Both were capable and well prepared. One had connections that helped him move forward and eventually reach the Military Academy in Modena.

The other was rejected during the selection process after a medical examination identified a physical problem.

What stayed with me was not simply that one succeeded and the other failed.

It was the suspicion that the difference between them had not been their ability.

If someone cannot defeat you on preparation, there is always another way to stop you.

I was only eight, so I had no vocabulary for what I was witnessing. I didn't know about cronyism, patronage, social networks, or what I would later call relational capital.

I only knew that something wasn't right.

Years later, that memory became the starting point for the first poem I ever wrote: The Donkey Climbing the Stairs.

The title came from the absurdity of the image itself: a donkey somehow climbing stairs while someone who actually knows how to climb is left behind.

Injustice becomes different when it happens to someone you know

As a child, I had already been deeply disturbed by images of historical violence.

I remember seeing films depicting the massacres of Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. I remember images of Nazi concentration camps and the horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Those events were immense. They belonged to history, to distant places and distant generations.

But the story of those two boys was different.

It wasn't history.

It was my world.

I knew the boy who moved forward. I knew the boy who was stopped.

That makes injustice harder to look away from.

Perhaps this is where our sense of justice really begins—not with political theory or moral philosophy, but with the first moment when we look at something happening in front of us and instinctively think:

This is not right.

Privilege rarely looks dramatic

As I grew older, I realized that favoritism does not always announce itself with a major political scandal or a coveted public job.

Sometimes it is much smaller.

A connection that moves someone ahead on a waiting list.

A phone call that gets an appointment sooner.

A professional who makes an exception.

A favor that is quietly returned.

A door that opens because someone knows the person on the other side.

None of these things, taken separately, seems capable of changing a society.

But societies are not shaped only by spectacular acts of corruption.

They are also shaped by thousands of ordinary exceptions.

The problem begins when the formal rules remain equal while access to those rules becomes unequal.

The law may be the same for everyone. The path through it may not be.

The child who wanted justice

When I wrote The Donkey Climbing the Stairs, I had no theory of power.

I wasn't trying to explain Italian society.

I wasn't writing about political parties or ideology.

I was simply trying to give a shape to something that had disturbed me as a child.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much of that eight-year-old boy is still inside me.

Because growing older changes our relationship with justice.

Children tend to believe that if something is wrong, someone should fix it.

Adults learn that the world is much harder to repair.

We discover that injustice is not an exception to human history. It is one of its recurring features.

We discover that we cannot fight every battle.

And eventually we face a more uncomfortable question:

What do you do when you realize that the world will not necessarily become fair?

The Zealot, the Pharisee, and the Sadducee

I have sometimes imagined three possible answers.

The first is the Zealot: the person who continues fighting injustice wherever he encounters it, regardless of the personal cost.

The second is the Pharisee, in my own contemporary interpretation of the figure: someone who publicly presents himself as a defender of justice, but may eventually turn that struggle into a career, a social identity, or a source of power.

And then there is the Sadducee.

The Sadducee, as I imagine him, has a different ambition.

He doesn't want to save the world.

He wants to reach a position where the world can no longer determine his fate.

He settles his own grievances. He secures his own position. He makes himself sufficiently strong, connected, or independent that he no longer needs society to be fair to him.

There is something undeniably cynical about that position.

But it raises an uncomfortable question:

Is open self-interest more honest than pretending that personal ambition is a universal cause?

I don't have a final answer.

Perhaps because I still contain all three figures.

The child who wanted justice.

The adult who understands power.

And the man who sometimes wonders whether the safest way to escape injustice is not to defeat it, but to become strong enough that it can no longer reach you.

What happens when justice is no longer guaranteed?

Maybe growing up does not mean losing our belief in justice.

Maybe it means discovering that justice is not guaranteed.

From there, people choose different paths.

Some keep fighting.

Some adapt.

Some enter the system hoping to change it.

Some enter the system because they want a share of its advantages.

And some eventually decide that their only realistic goal is to protect themselves.

I still don't know which path I will ultimately take.

But I know where the question began.

It began with two boys.

One kept climbing.

The other was stopped.

And somewhere behind that memory is an eight-year-old child who did not yet know the words clientelism, privilege, or relational capital.

He didn't need them.

He only needed to see an injustice.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about growing older:

we spend years learning the language to describe what a child can recognize in a single moment.

From Covert Power to Relational Power

When people talk about Italian scandals involving covert networks of power, collective memory inevitably returns to P2. Licio Gelli’s lodge represents, in the Italian imagination, the classic model of clandestine power: an organized, hierarchical, recognizable structure, with members, relationships, and objectives that sought to remain hidden from public scrutiny.

But over the past few decades, a different form of power brokerage has emerged. P3, which came to light through judicial investigations in 2010, and above all the Mafia Capitale investigation, revealed phenomena different from P2, but useful for examining the same underlying question: how are power relationships actually built when formal institutions are not enough to explain what is happening?

From the Lodge to the Network

The fundamental difference lies in the structure.

A lodge belongs to a vertical model: there is an organization, there are memberships, there are internal rules, and there is a relatively clear boundary between those who are inside and those who are outside.

The model that has emerged from more recent cases is much more fluid. There is not necessarily a single command center. There may be individuals who simultaneously belong to different worlds, personal relationships that cross political and economic circles, interests that temporarily converge, and intermediaries capable of connecting people who would normally have no direct relationship with one another.

This is where the concept of the “Middle World” takes on a meaning that goes beyond any single criminal case.

“We Are in the Middle”

In the Mafia Capitale case, Massimo Carminati described, in a wiretapped conversation, his conception of a world in which the “upper” and “lower” levels met: on one side, politics and business; on the other, organized crime; and in the middle, individuals capable of connecting these environments and turning relationships into exchanges of mutual benefit.

The statement is not a scientific theory of power, nor can it automatically be taken as a description of the entire Italian political system. Yet it is an extremely effective representation of a particular mechanism: the power of the intermediary.

An intermediary does not necessarily have to control everyone. It is enough for that person to be indispensable to someone.

They may know the politician who has access to the decision-making process, the entrepreneur who controls the resources, the public official who understands the procedures, the professional who knows how to navigate the bureaucracy, and the criminal figure capable of applying pressure that others cannot exert directly.

Their power comes precisely from the connection.

The Gray Zone

This may be the most important difference from the traditional image of P2.

Contemporary power does not always need to hide completely. It can operate within the gray zone of personal relationships, where the boundary between a professional relationship, friendship, favor, economic interest, and political influence can become difficult to draw.

Public contracts, consulting arrangements, cooperatives, companies, appointments, associations, foundations, professional firms, and personal relationships can, in certain circumstances, become spaces where different interests converge.

This does not mean that every relationship between politics, business, and civil society is suspicious. Rather, it means that when oversight mechanisms are weak, informal networks can acquire an importance far greater than their formal status would suggest.

And this is precisely where the Mafia Capitale case becomes instructive.

The Limits of the Mafia Metaphor

There is, however, an important distinction that must not be overlooked.

The Mafia Capitale investigation was initially built in part around allegations involving mafia-type association. In the subsequent judicial proceedings, however, this classification was not upheld for the organization as a whole. The courts distinguished conduct characterized by violence and extortion from conduct based primarily on corruption and the management of relationships with public officials.

This point is crucial because it prevents us from turning the “Middle World” into a legal category that it is not.

It can instead, with the necessary caution, be understood as a sociological metaphor for the power of intermediation.

And perhaps that is precisely the most interesting part.

Power No Longer Needs a Secret Room

The old idea of covert power imagines a locked room, a handful of men sitting around a table, and a shared strategy.

Relational power can work differently.

It does not necessarily require a room. A series of phone calls, dinners, friendships, connections, companies, appointments, and reciprocal favors may be enough.

Not everyone needs to know the entire plan. It may be sufficient for each person to know the right person.

In this sense, power becomes networked.

Its strength depends not only on the position someone occupies, but also on the quantity and quality of the connections that person is able to control.

It is a much harder model to identify because it does not necessarily leave behind a membership card, a list of members, or a hierarchical structure.

It leaves relationships.

From P2 to the “Middle World”?

It would therefore be wrong to portray P2, P3, and Mafia Capitale as stages in the development of a single clandestine organization. They are not.

But they can, cautiously, be viewed as different episodes through which Italy has experienced different forms of informal interaction between institutional power, economic interests, and networks of influence.

P2 belongs to the logic of the lodge and the secret organization.

P3 concerns a different judicial case involving allegations of a secret association and activities aimed at influencing institutions.

The “Middle World,” by contrast, emerged from an investigation into crime and corruption in Rome and from a particular conception of the relationships between criminal networks, politics, and business.

Putting them on the same level would be historically inaccurate.

Putting them into dialogue at the level of the sociology of power, however, may be far more interesting.

Because the question is no longer simply: Who belongs to the network?

The question becomes: Who is capable of connecting worlds that would normally have no way of communicating with one another?

And perhaps this is one of the most important forms of contemporary power.

Not necessarily the person who commands.

Not necessarily the person who makes the decision.

But the person who can open a door.

And above all, the person who can decide whom to open it for.

I’m Not Bad, They Just Draw Me That Way

From Naples to the stereotypes of the world: how the images others create can become the way we learn to see people, cities, and entire nations

Before many people ever set foot in Naples, they have already met it.

They have seen it on television, in movies, photographs, newspaper headlines, travel stories, and social media. They have heard about the narrow streets, Mount Vesuvius, pizza, traffic, music, laundry hanging from balconies, warmth, noise, and theatricality. But they may also have encountered another Naples: organized crime, garbage, decay, disorder, corruption, and inefficiency. By the time they arrive, they are not starting from scratch. They are carrying a picture with them.

That is what makes Naples such an interesting place to begin a much larger conversation. The point is not to decide whether the image of Naples is true or false. Some parts are rooted in reality. Others are exaggerated, simplified, recycled, or detached from their original context. The more interesting question is this: How often do we think we know something because we were taught an image of it before we ever experienced it for ourselves?

Reality Is Too Big to See All at Once

None of us can experience the world directly in its entirety. We cannot live in every city, meet every person, understand every culture, witness every event, or personally verify every story. We depend on information, images, narratives, and mental categories to navigate a reality that is simply too large to absorb firsthand.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem begins when the map starts replacing the territory.

Walter Lippmann understood this problem when he wrote about the pictures people carry in their heads—mental representations that help them make sense of a world they cannot fully see. We do not encounter reality in its entirety. We encounter fragments of it, filtered through other people, institutions, media, language, memory, and expectation.

Something curious can happen as a result. We encounter the image before we encounter the reality. And when reality finally appears in front of us, we may already know what we are supposed to see.

Naples as a Laboratory of Stereotypes

Naples makes this mechanism unusually visible because it has long been represented through a collection of instantly recognizable images.

Say the word “Naples,” and certain pictures may appear immediately: pizza, Vesuvius, the sea, folklore, exuberance, family, street life. Or perhaps the darker images arrive first: organized crime, traffic, disorder, garbage, poverty, chaos.

Both versions can exist in the same person's mind.

That is precisely the point.

We do not need to invent a fictional Naples in order to create a stereotype. We only need to select certain elements of a real city, repeat them often enough, and attach them to the identity of millions of people.

But a city is also made of everything that rarely becomes an image. It is made of people who go to work, attend universities, conduct research, run businesses, teach children, care for parents, write books, manage offices, build families, and live ordinary lives.

Ordinary life, however, is rarely spectacular.

And what is not spectacular is often less visible.

A Stereotype Can Begin With Something True

Perhaps the most difficult stereotypes to challenge are not the ones that are completely fabricated. They are the ones that contain a piece of truth.

Naples has serious problems. Organized crime exists. There are areas affected by degradation. There are acts of incivility, administrative failures, corruption, and social problems that deserve to be investigated and reported.

Denying those realities in order to defend the city's reputation would simply create another distortion.

The problem begins with the next step: moving from “this happens” to “this is what they are like.”

That is where an observation becomes an identity.

A behavior becomes a characteristic.

An episode becomes a category.

And a partial truth begins to function as a total explanation.

From “It Happens” to “That’s Who They Are”

There is a profound difference between saying that something happens and saying that a particular group is “like that.”

The first describes a phenomenon. The second assigns a permanent characteristic to an entire population.

The transition can be almost invisible. An incident becomes an example. The example gets repeated. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity begins to feel like knowledge. Eventually, we no longer feel the need to verify the assumption every time.

The category seems already understood.

That is how many stereotypes survive—not because they explain everything, but because they make explanation unnecessary.

When the Category Arrives Before the Person

The mechanism becomes even more revealing when the stereotype moves from places to people.

An accent can trigger assumptions about someone's personality. A last name can suggest a social background. A neighborhood can imply trustworthiness or danger. Clothing can become a supposed indicator of wealth. Age can become a prediction of ability. A profession can be reduced to a caricature.

The person then arrives after the category.

Before they have said anything, we may already have a theory about who they are.

From that moment on, everything they do can be interpreted through the original expectation. If they confirm it, we think we were right. If they contradict it, we may simply classify them as an exception.

The stereotype survives either way.

Naples Is Only One Example

At this point, we have to leave Naples behind.

Because the same mechanism operates almost everywhere.

Italians can be reduced to family, food, fashion, soccer, passion—and the Mafia. Americans can be reduced to consumerism, individualism, ambition, guns, or the pursuit of success. The French can become a shorthand for elegance and arrogance. Germans for discipline and rigidity. The British for reserve, irony, and emotional restraint.

The point is not to determine how much truth each cliché contains.

The more important question is why it is so easy to take a handful of traits, attach them to millions of people, and then use that image as a shortcut for understanding them.

The same thing happens with categories that have nothing to do with nationality.

Young people are irresponsible. Older people are out of touch. Rich people are selfish. Poor people are authentic. Immigrants are associated with certain social problems. Professionals are assumed to have certain motives. People from certain neighborhoods are expected to behave in certain ways.

Again and again, a complicated human reality is compressed into an image that can be recognized in seconds.

Even a Positive Stereotype Can Become a Cage

We usually think of stereotypes as something negative. But flattering stereotypes can be restrictive too.

If a Neapolitan is supposed to be funny, spontaneous, loud, and warm, what happens when he is quiet?

If an Italian is supposed to be passionate and creative, what happens when she is methodical and reserved?

If an Asian person is expected to be naturally gifted at mathematics, what happens when he is not?

A positive stereotype can still become a form of pressure because it leaves less room for an individual to simply be an individual.

Whether flattering or hostile, the basic operation is the same.

A real person is replaced by an expectation.

Repetition Turns Association Into Knowledge

This is where mass communication becomes so powerful.

An image seen once may be forgotten. An image repeated hundreds of times begins to feel familiar. And what feels familiar can easily start to feel true.

There is no need to imagine a grand conspiracy. The ordinary logic of information can produce the effect on its own.

A tragedy is more newsworthy than an uneventful day. A crime attracts more attention than thousands of ordinary acts of honesty. Conflict is more dramatic than cooperation. A shocking image is more likely to be shared than a photograph of everyday life.

None of this requires anyone to deliberately falsify reality.

But if we repeatedly see the exceptional, we can eventually forget how much of reality is ordinary.

And when the ordinary disappears from view, the exceptional can begin to look normal.

We Are Not Always Told What to Think

This is also where Edward Bernays's ideas about communication and persuasion become relevant.

Influence does not always work by explicitly telling people what to think. Sometimes it works by teaching them what to associate with what.

If a city is repeatedly connected with chaos, the connection can begin to feel natural. If a population is repeatedly associated with danger, the association can become automatic. If a particular lifestyle is constantly linked to success, we may begin to desire it without ever asking who created that association or why.

That is the subtle power of association.

It does not necessarily give us an order.

It gives us a connection.

And after hearing that connection often enough, we may forget that we learned it somewhere.

When Prejudice Becomes an Invisible Tax

Once a stereotype enters everyday life, it can stop being merely an image and start producing tangible consequences.

Someone may hear, “You don't seem Neapolitan.”

The remark may be intended as a compliment. But hidden inside it is an assumption about what a Neapolitan is supposed to look like, sound like, or behave like.

The same thing can happen with an accent, a last name, a school, a neighborhood, or a social background.

Of course, not every rejection, hiring decision, or negative judgment can be attributed to territorial or social prejudice. Individual cases require evidence.

But the broader mechanism is easy to recognize: when a category arrives before the individual, the individual may have to prove that he or she does not fit the image.

That can become an invisible tax on reputation.

It does not appear on a bill.

It is not written into a contract.

But it can take the form of having to explain more, prove more, and overcome expectations that existed before the conversation even began.

When Expectations Change What We See

There is an even deeper problem.

Our expectations do not merely influence the conclusion we reach. They can influence what we notice along the way.

If we expect someone to be aggressive, a blunt response may look like confirmation. If we expect the same person to be kind, we may interpret that exact response as fatigue, frustration, or an isolated moment.

The behavior has not necessarily changed.

The frame through which we interpret it has.

This is why prejudice can be so difficult to correct. We tend to notice what confirms what we already believe and overlook what contradicts it. Reality is no longer simply being observed. It is being filtered.

At that point, the stereotype can become more than a description.

It can begin to participate in creating the social reality it claims merely to describe.

The World Is Full of Naples

Once we understand the mechanism, Naples looks different.

It is no longer simply a city struggling against stereotypes. It becomes a lens through which we can examine how human beings construct images of other human beings.

Every country has its clichés. Every society has its categories. Every generation creates its own assumptions. Some stereotypes disappear. Others survive for centuries. Some concern nationality or ethnicity. Others concern class, age, gender, occupation, education, neighborhoods, or social status.

The mechanism remains remarkably similar.

We take a part and use it to explain the whole.

Telling the Truth Is Not the Problem

Talking about stereotypes does not mean asking journalists to hide what is uncomfortable.

Naples must be allowed to be reported honestly. Crime should be reported. Corruption should be investigated. Degradation should be documented. Administrative failures should be exposed.

The problem begins when one part of reality becomes the only language through which an entire city is recognized.

Reporting a crime is journalism.

Using crime to imply that millions of people share a particular character is something else.

Describing a social problem is necessary.

Turning that problem into a collective identity requires another step.

Truth does not become less true because it is incomplete. But a partial truth can become dangerously misleading when the selected part is allowed to stand in for the whole.

Who Taught Us to See?

Perhaps, in the end, the most interesting question is not about Naples at all.

It is about us.

Who taught us what to expect from a Neapolitan? From an American? From an immigrant? From someone who lives in a poor neighborhood? From a wealthy person? From a young person? From an older person?

How much of what we believe comes from direct experience?

And how much was handed to us by our families, schools, television, movies, advertising, politics, social media, or ordinary conversations?

How many of our assumptions have we actually tested?

And how many simply feel like common sense because we have heard them for so long?

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about stereotypes is that we often do not recognize them as stereotypes.

They feel like knowledge.

Naples Is Where We Begin

Naples does not need to be acquitted.

Nor does it need to be condemned.

It simply needs to be allowed to remain larger than any single image of it.

And that is the point where Naples becomes a starting point rather than a destination.

Because the same question can be asked of every city, every country, every social group—and eventually every individual.

Whenever we think we know someone before meeting them, a people before knowing its individuals, or a city before walking its streets, we should ask ourselves where that image came from.

Because perhaps we are not seeing only what is in front of us.

Perhaps we are also seeing everything we were taught to see.

Naples is where we begin.

Stereotypes are everywhere.

And perhaps the first step toward seeing beyond them is not to stop judging.

It is to recognize how often we have already decided who someone is before we have actually met them.

Hitler Never Really Left

We like to believe history ends.

It doesn’t.

We defeat a dictator, bury a generation, sign treaties, build institutions, raise monuments, and teach our children that the nightmare is over. Then we congratulate ourselves for having learned the lesson.

But history does not care about our lessons.

Taking your medicine last year never stopped anyone from catching a cold the next.

The Myth of “Never Again”

Since 1945, the world has been at war again and again. Revolutions. Military coups. Civil wars. Dictatorships. Invasions. Ethnic cleansing.

We simply learned how to look away.

For decades, Western Europe enjoyed the luxury of watching much of this from behind a political and geographical glass wall. The wars were somewhere else: Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. They were “regional conflicts.” They belonged to other people.

Then Yugoslavia exploded.

War returned to the European continent. Nationalism became a weapon. Cities were besieged. Populations were displaced. Ethnic cleansing became a reality not in some distant history book, but in Europe itself.

The glass wall cracked.

And suddenly, the comforting idea that certain horrors belonged to another age became much harder to defend.

History had not disappeared.

We had simply moved it out of the frame.

Hitler Never Really Left

No, Hitler did not survive 1945 as a man.

But the political conditions he exploited did not disappear from human nature.

Fear did not disappear. Economic insecurity did not disappear. National humiliation did not disappear. The desire for simple answers to complicated problems did not disappear. Neither did the temptation to blame someone else.

That is what “Hitler never really left” means.

Not that history repeats itself word for word. It doesn’t.

History changes its clothes.

The uniforms change. The slogans change. The technology changes. The enemies change.

But the machinery of fear can still be rebuilt.

The Democratic Shell

There is another uncomfortable reality: a democracy can survive institutionally while becoming increasingly hollow socially.

You can still have elections, parliaments, courts, constitutions, and political parties. You can preserve the machinery while losing the trust that makes the machinery legitimate.

And when people begin to believe that the system no longer represents them, protects them, or gives their children a credible future, something happens.

They start looking elsewhere.

Sometimes they look toward nationalism. Sometimes toward populism. Sometimes toward authoritarian leaders promising to cut through the institutional noise and restore order.

The response is often to condemn the symptom.

The harder question is to understand the conditions that made the symptom politically possible.

When the Market Becomes a Religion

For decades, Western societies were told that the market knew best.

Deregulation. Privatization. Flexibility. Competitiveness. Efficiency. Less government. More market.

These were not merely economic policies. They became a worldview.

The individual was increasingly expected to absorb risks once shared by society. The worker became “flexible.” The welfare state became “expensive.” Public services became “inefficient.” Inequality could be explained away as the unavoidable price of modernization.

For those who prospered, the system could look like freedom.

For those who lost security, bargaining power, community, or a sense of control over their future, it could look very different.

And here lies one of the great political contradictions of our time.

The same societies that embraced decades of neoliberal economics can now find themselves frightened by the political backlash produced by the social consequences of that economic order.

Enter Atlas

This is where Atlas comes in.

In the ancient myth, Atlas carries the heavens on his shoulders. He does not get to put the burden down. He simply carries it.

Forever.

That image has become strangely relevant to the modern West.

For decades, ordinary people were asked to carry the weight of globalization, technological disruption, labor-market transformation, fiscal restraint, international competition, and shrinking economic security.

They were told that this was the price of progress.

Keep carrying.

Keep adapting.

Keep competing.

Keep consuming.

Keep believing.

And now something has changed.

Atlas is tired.

Worse, Atlas has started asking a dangerous question:

Why am I still carrying the sky?

When Atlas Moves

That question is politically explosive.

Because if the people carrying the system stop believing in the system, the system itself begins to shake.

The backlash can take many forms: nationalism, protectionism, anti-establishment politics, isolationism, immigration restrictions, distrust of elites, nostalgia for a stronger state, and anger at international institutions.

Some of these responses may be contradictory. Some may be destructive. Some may be based on false assumptions.

But dismissing them as irrational does not make them disappear.

People do not become politically discontented in a vacuum. They respond to the world they believe they are living in.

And when enough people conclude that the existing order is no longer working for them, someone will eventually promise to tear that order apart.

The Dangerous Mistake

The dangerous mistake is to believe that defending democracy means defending every economic arrangement that currently exists within it.

It doesn’t.

Democracy is not a stock market index. It is not a balance sheet. It is not a permanent guarantee that tomorrow will resemble yesterday.

Democracy survives when people believe they have a meaningful stake in the society they inhabit.

Take that belief away for long enough, and formal institutions may remain standing while something much more important begins to collapse underneath them.

Trust.

Belonging.

Hope.

History Does Not Repeat. It Rhymes.

The twenty-first century will not reproduce the twentieth century.

There will be no perfect replay of 1933.

There doesn’t need to be.

History rarely repeats itself exactly.

It rhymes.

The danger is not that another Hitler will suddenly appear wearing Hitler’s clothes. The danger is that a society can once again create the conditions in which someone offering fear, certainty, enemies, and absolute solutions becomes politically attractive.

That is why “never again” cannot simply mean remembering the past.

It has to mean recognizing the mechanisms that made the past possible.

Otherwise, remembrance becomes ritual.

And ritual without understanding is little more than decoration.

The Sky Is Already Moving

Perhaps the most important question is not whether authoritarianism is returning.

Perhaps it is this:

What happens when the people holding up the existing order decide they no longer want to hold it?

That is the question behind the revolt of Atlas.

For decades, he carried the sky because he was told there was no alternative.

Now he is looking upward.

He sees the weight. He sees who benefits from the structure above him. And he is beginning to wonder whether the sky really has to remain where it is.

We can condemn Atlas for moving. We can fear what might happen if he lets go. We can insist that the old order is the only protection against chaos.

But there is one question we cannot avoid forever:

Why did Atlas become willing to drop the sky in the first place?

Because taking the medicine yesterday never made anyone immune to tomorrow’s fever.

The Lottery of Fame

For a long time, I thought of literary success as a giant lottery. Thousands of people write books, publish them, and try to find an audience. Only a tiny fraction break through. The metaphor that came to mind was the sperm cell: millions set out, only one reaches the egg, and the rest disappear without a trace.

Literature can look much the same. A hundred writers may publish a hundred perfectly respectable books, yet perhaps only one gets a second edition, an important review, wider distribution, or the attention of influential critics. Then come the universities, the schools, the translations, the reprints. Eventually, that writer becomes “important.”

The others simply vanish.

But there is a problem with this explanation.

Who decides which sperm cells get the chance to survive?

Heidegger and the Machinery of Culture

This is where Martin Heidegger’s reflections on art and culture introduce a variable that was missing from my original metaphor.

A work does not remain alive simply because someone wrote it. It has to be preserved, interpreted, republished, taught, discussed, and passed on. It has to enter a cultural world that keeps it visible.

And that world is not neutral.

This does not necessarily mean that a handful of powerful people sit around a table and decide which books will become immortal. The reality is both less dramatic and more powerful than that.

Every age builds its cultural hierarchy through publishers, critics, newspapers, universities, schools, prizes, libraries, foundations, markets, and public institutions. Each makes countless decisions about what deserves attention and what does not.

Taken together, those decisions help create what we call the literary canon.

Power Doesn't Have to Censor You

The most interesting part is that power does not have to ban a work in order to marginalize it.

Sometimes it only has to leave it unsupported.

A book that is never reprinted becomes harder to find. A writer who is never reviewed becomes harder to discover. An author who is never studied at universities becomes harder to turn into an object of serious scholarship. A work that never makes it into the classroom is much less likely to be passed down to the next generation.

The reverse is equally true.

Once a book enters the school curriculum, millions of people may encounter it simply because an institution has placed it in front of them.

At that point something remarkable happens:

fame begins to look natural, even though it has been built through a long chain of decisions.

Publishers Decide What Gets a Shot

Before the classroom comes the publisher.

Every year, an enormous number of manuscripts are written. But publishing space is limited. Editors have to decide what gets published, how much money to put behind it, how many copies to print, how aggressively to market it, where to distribute it, and whether to keep investing in the author.

Talent is only one factor.

The genre matters. The market matters. The timing matters. The expected audience matters. An author's connections and public profile may matter. So does the possibility of turning a book into a media event.

A manuscript sitting in a drawer cannot compete with a book backed by a national distribution network.

Not necessarily because it is worse.

Simply because it never got the same shot.

The Market Doesn't Just Discover Taste. It Shapes It.

This also complicates the familiar idea that the market merely discovers what people already want.

The market can help create what people eventually learn to want.

If a publisher spends heavily promoting an author, gets the book into bookstores, newspapers, podcasts, television programs, literary festivals, and social media, that author gains a level of visibility that an equally talented writer without that machinery is unlikely to achieve.

Then the sales figures arrive.

“The public chose the book.”

Perhaps.

But the public chose it after someone had made sure the public knew it existed.

That distinction matters.

Universities Confer Legitimacy

Then there is academia.

Universities do not simply study whatever happens to exist. They also help determine what is worth studying.

An author becomes the subject of dissertations, conferences, academic papers, courses, and scholarly debates. Specialists emerge. Those specialists produce more scholarship. The bibliography grows.

And a self-reinforcing cycle begins:

A work is considered important. It is studied. More scholarship is produced about it. Its academic importance grows. It is taught. It enters textbooks. It becomes part of the canon.

Recognition creates more recognition.

That does not necessarily mean manipulation. It is an institutional process.

But the consequence is real: once an author is inside the canon, that author has far more opportunities to remain there than a writer who never got inside in the first place.

Schools Turn the Canon Into Collective Memory

School is where the process becomes especially powerful.

A writer taught to millions of students is no longer simply an author. That writer becomes part of collective memory.

Entire generations encounter the same names, the same poems, the same novels, the same historical narratives. The next generation then inherits them already labeled as “important.”

At that point, the original cultural choice can become almost invisible.

A student learns that Dante is a great writer.

But the historical question is not whether Dante deserves to be read. It is:

How did Dante come to occupy this particular place in our cultural memory, and how has that position been reinforced and reinterpreted over the centuries?

The same question can be asked about Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, Manzoni, and countless others.

Their literary value was not necessarily invented by institutions. But their position in the cultural hierarchy is also the product of a long history of selection, interpretation, preservation, and transmission.

This Is Where Gramsci Comes Back In

This is where Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony becomes useful.

A ruling class does not have to dictate every idea directly. It can help create an environment in which certain values, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world become dominant.

Applied to literature, this does not mean that “the powerful write the books we are told to read.”

It means something more subtle.

The institutions through which a society produces and transmits culture do not exist outside that society's structures of power.

Publishing, academia, education, journalism, the market, and cultural institutions are all embedded in history.

And every historical period therefore tends to elevate certain works while leaving others in the shadows.

The Most Powerful Part of the Canon Is That It Looks Natural

Perhaps the greatest power of a canon is that, once established, it stops looking like something that was constructed.

A student walks into a classroom and encounters Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, and Leopardi. The student does not ask who decided these were the authors worth studying. They are simply presented as “the greats.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with having a canon. A society needs a cultural inheritance. We cannot reinvent the entire library every morning.

But there is a legitimate question hiding underneath it:

How many writers disappeared because they never gained access to the institutions capable of preserving and transmitting their work?

And how many survived not only because of their talent, but because they happened to benefit from historical circumstances that allowed their work to be preserved?

That question does not destroy the canon.

It puts the canon back into history.

Famous Yesterday, Forgotten Today

History is full of reminders that fame is temporary.

Tommaso Grossi was a major literary celebrity in nineteenth-century Italy. Today he is far less familiar to the general public than Manzoni. Giovanni Prati was a widely known poet in his own time; today he is primarily read by specialists.

Outside Italy, Marie Corelli was one of the bestselling authors of the Victorian era. Today, her name is largely absent from popular literary culture.

And then there is the opposite phenomenon.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville did not immediately acquire the canonical status it enjoys today. Melville's reputation declined dramatically during his lifetime, and his major literary rehabilitation came later.

So the present is not necessarily capable of telling us what the future will remember.

Fame is a snapshot.

The canon is a sediment.

Memory is a selection process that can continue for centuries.

The Real Lottery Begins After Fame

This forces me to revise my original sperm-cell metaphor.

I once imagined that the great lottery was the one that took a writer from obscurity to fame.

Perhaps that is only the first lottery.

The real selection begins afterward.

A writer must first be published, then read, then reprinted, then reviewed, then studied, then taught, and eventually rediscovered and reinterpreted by later generations.

At every stage, writers fall away.

And in the end, only a tiny number remain.

They are not necessarily just the best. They are the ones that managed to survive a long chain of historical selections.

Talent may be necessary.

But talent alone is not enough.

Someone has to open the door. Someone has to invest. Someone has to promote. Someone has to teach. Someone has to preserve. Someone has to rediscover.

So Who Gets to Decide What We Remember?

This does not mean that every great writer has a powerful puppeteer pulling the strings. That would be an easy explanation—and often an impossible one to prove.

The reality is more unsettling precisely because it does not require a conspiracy.

Those who control the mechanisms of cultural transmission possess a measure of power over what a society will remember.

Publishers decide what gets a place in the market. Critics help determine what deserves attention. The market determines what can be financially sustained. Universities determine what receives scholarship. Schools determine what millions of young people encounter. Institutions preserve some works and neglect others. Later generations decide what deserves to be rediscovered.

What we call “culture” is therefore not only the spontaneous accumulation of humanity's greatest achievements.

It is also the result of an enormous, largely invisible process of selection.

And that changes the problem for the writer.

The challenge is not simply to get published.

It is to survive cultural selection.

Being published means entering the present.

Being famous means belonging to your own time.

Being remembered means surviving the market, institutions, intellectual fashions, political interests, changing tastes—and ultimately, death.

Perhaps that is the hardest form of literary success of all:

not winning the lottery of your own age, but surviving the lottery of the ages that come after you.