Anachronistic short circuit

There's a question that has haunted me for a long time. Why in Italy, so many years after the key events, are there still so many people who identify with the clash between fascists and anti-fascists? Why hasn't the anachronism of the issues under debate relegated the debaters to the history books too?

One answer might come from drawing a parallel with genetics.
When the collective trauma caused by a social rupture is too damaging, when events have exceeded the limit of what humans can handle, the scarring mechanism that normally lets us turn the page, and lets the news of the day ferment until it becomes history, fails. It simply never kicks in. The wound doesn't close, the trauma stays, the social rupture itself is never repaired, and the flaps of torn flesh stay splayed.

Right — that's the result. But how does the process work? Just as parents' genetic material is passed down to their children, the polarizations in question — the "severe" ones, as opposed to those that have been defused — are mistakenly passed from one generation to the next along with the "healthy" cultural traits. Let's remember, staying within genetics, that even the mechanism of DNA propagation can make errors.

Membership in the opposing groups of a given era, which normally loses its value when history moves on to the next chapter, is perpetuated in these extreme cases. This happens not only from parent to child, but also from teacher to student, elder to young person, group to individual, guru to follower, and so on.

One side effect of this ongoing process, which also fuels a self-reinforcing feedback loop, is the concrete fact that people who have been absorbed into one of the two groups openly declare their membership, and so find themselves facing people who just as genuinely belong to the "enemy" camp. They therefore feel entitled to keep fighting their battles. It's an illusory war, like that of the Japanese soldiers who stayed lying in wait in the Philippine jungles for decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Illusory in its premises, but real in its concreteness. In essence, it's a division that is real but no longer supported by the historical foundations that produced and sustained it.
Fascism and anti-fascism, though they have long had no historical rationale, are seen as necessary movements precisely because people haven't stopped embodying them. That is, they make no sense and make sense at the same time.

The solution to the bind, which people commonly assume must be political, or worse yet military, should instead be sought in the toolboxes of other disciplines: sociology and psychology. Polarization is a genuine group pathology, and like any pathology it shouldn't be debated but treated.
Why would it be important to treat it? First of all because, like any physiological problem, it causes dysfunctional consequences. Moreover, since we're evidently on the verge of an epochal change that should command all the energy we have, if it's even enough, polarization is an extremely dangerous distraction from the fundamental goals of a national system.

Of course, I don't believe at all that we'll be able to come to our senses, wake up, and get out of this dream set in the past in order to face the challenges of the present. I fear instead that the thrashings dealt by those challenges will force us into a very traumatic awakening.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.