Someone wrote: ‘A child is not taught to respect a gay person, he is taught to respect everyone. He is not taught not to hit a black person, he is taught not to hit anyone. They are not taught not to mistreat a woman, they are taught not to mistreat anyone.”
Unfortunately, to come to understand this would require breaking out of the self-referential bubble that makes everyone perceive themselves as the centre of the world to whom everything is due. The culture of the NOs that help one to grow today is something of which we have lost not only track, but even memory, and in a context characterized by such shortcomings, the ‘others of us’ have only one function, only one role, which consists of praising, approving, admiring, gratifying, and applauding us, blessing our every statement, decision, choice, and opinion as if it were the revelation of a new God on earth.
Influencers are an example of this, and the size of the infinite plethora of those who follow them admiring them and vowing to learn from them how to emulate them gives us the measure of the seriousness of the problem. Eventually, a polycentric society in which everyone sees themselves as the centre of the world can only crumble and disappear. In such a sick context, even diversity is no longer a simple condition, but rather one that assumes only two possible roles, depending on whether the individual is the spectator of that diversity or the interpreter and/or bearer of it: the dramatic role of divisive aggregator.
The false myth of the inclusive society stems from a primary educational failure, which its standard bearers do not seek to remedy by aiming to restore the educational direction recalled at the beginning, but rather to use in a divisive key that society, that country in which this myth is dogmatically imposed for political purposes that have decidedly nothing politically correct about them.
It thus happens that in a society such as ours, in which the existing political lobbies that make the ghettoisation of diversity their flag, like those that make ostentatious diversity their banner, boasting the denial of diversity, in fact do not differ in anything since, in the light of the facts, they aim exclusively, or at least try to, to hoard easy consensus for purposes that have nothing to do with the vaunted implementation of inclusiveness, but rather with the legitimization of media and therefore political power to assert their undisputed primacy.
In such a context, diversity becomes a political weapon, the primary source of the radicalisation of opposition and the main tool with which to break down every communicative bridge whose construction is seen as a threat to one’s own power.
How many political parties, movements, associations would disappear if from tomorrow the only normality became mutual acceptance?
How many leaders would lose their role and with this loss also the political power that goes with it? The oppositions based on the different values attributed to one’s religious beliefs, one’s sexual choices, one’s skin colour, are so many sources of political legitimization for those who need those oppositions to implement the practice of divide and rule.
Being homosexual or heterosexual is an objective condition on a par with being black or white, Muslim or Christian, monogamous or promiscuous – and as such should in no way be a source of pride or shame, of brotherhood or hatred.
Apparently the primary human need, or at least one of the primary needs, seems to be hatred, or rather, having someone to hate.
Proof of this comes from a 2016 study by University College London, which reconstructs for us the sources and spread of political, racial and anti-feminist hatred on the Internet, starting from 4chan, the American alt-right site, one of the ”darkest corners of the Net”, as Gianluca Stringhini, one of the authors of the article entitled ”Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web”, defined it. , the result of research carried out by the aforementioned Gianluca Stringhini with the collaboration of Gabriel Emile Hine, Jeremiah Onaolapo, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nicolas Kourtellis, Ilias Leontiadis, Riginos Samaras, and Jeremy Blackburn.
The aim of the work was to understand what generates and how hatred propagates on the Internet, how, in the short span of the last 15-20 years, thanks to YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter, it has reached the current levels of hatred on the Internet, which is like a miasma-filled well that spews insults, fake news, incites hatred, coins racist insults, and confuses women with pornography.
As Stringhini himself pointed out during an interview in 2017, the study was conducted by following ‘4chan.org for several months during the election campaign and the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency’ and then went on to study ‘how fake news, insults and hate speech overflow on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter’ characterised by a level of amplification that is nothing short of insane.
During the same interview, Stringhini also recounted how he and his colleagues had to periodically get up from the computer and distract themselves by looking at pictures of kittens because ‘It’s not good to stay on sites like 4chan for a long time. I’m not saying we ended up convincing ourselves of what we were reading, but we certainly felt the influence even though we were only outside observers’.
The most interesting observation, in my opinion, that Stringhini gave us in the course of the interview is about the sources of all this: ‘Sometimes we had the impression that they were not just individuals, but parties or electoral movements. Some posts came from abroad. We mainly studied insults and fake news with political content, but we believe that the same mechanism is also at work for different topics. First you identify an enemy, then you attack it with a raid until you manage to drive it off the web’.
An observation that the first part of this article in some ways complements by sketching an attempt to answer another, much more pregnant question: that concerning the ‘fertility’ of the soil on which sites like 4chan sow: it is difficult to think that certain messages can pass and spread so quickly if they do not come to confirm ideas and prejudices that are already widely circulating among the recipients of the media hammering we have spoken of so far.
An interesting paper entitled ‘Britain first and the UK Independence Party: social media and Movement-Party dynamics’ by Thomas Davidson and Mabel Berezin in which we read: ‘Social movement scholars have recently turned their attention to the interactions between political parties and social movements, but little is known about how social media have influenced these relationships, despite the widespread adoption of these technologies. We present a case study of the relationship between Britain First, a far-right anti-Muslim social movement, and the U.K. Independence Party, the Eurosceptic political party that led the Brexit campaign. The movement appeared marginal in the press but dominated social media, exploiting this presence to support the party.
We examine the dynamics of the relationship between these groups from 2013 to 2017, drawing on data from social media, newspapers and other online sources and focusing on interactions between elites and grassroots supporters. Our findings illustrate how far-right groups have used new technologies to generate an unprecedented amount of popular support and to try to influence the political mainstream.” which brings us back to recent work published by DiplomaticInfo.com on the genesis of the uprising that inflamed France in July 2023.
