Extremism and its prophets, who dominate the discourse and seduce the masses. A book

‘Mass radicalism’ is a drug, a sort of opium that is clouding Western minds and consciences. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a virus that exploits the democratic system’s weakened defences to infiltrate a favourable environment, before multiplying and spreading until it infects the whole of society. The Opium of the West: Mass Radicalism in the Free World (Guerini) is the new essay in which Dario Fertilio – a writer and lecturer of a staunchly liberal-conservative persuasion – sets out his indictment of the new totalitarian, aggressive and persistent ideology that is poisoning open society.

The term ‘mass radicalism’ stems from the observation that, due to a combination of internal and external circumstances, a multitude of extremist theories are reaching and seducing an ever-growing and increasingly vulnerable segment of the public; a poisoning of the wellspring brought about by the West’s desire for self-destruction. The first stage of this offensive, explains Fertilio, is the indictment of the traditional family, judged to be a theatre of alienation and abuse of every kind, reviled and stigmatised as ‘patriarchal’ and ‘sexist’, a source of mutual resentment, hatred and sadism, as well as oppressive towards women; nothing more than a scaled-down reproduction of a Western society that is itself sick, poisoned by the capitalist logic of power, property, money and profit: in short, both family and society are deemed unworthy, immoral and deserving of destruction.

We, the poor victims of this system, therefore urgently need a process of ‘collective re-education’. Mass radicalism offers us the mirage of an ‘enchanted garden’ of a religious, almost mystical nature, to be built through the social constructivism of a new, strong and enlightened elite. The first step in this process is a complete deconstruction and reconstruction of language, involving the imposition of the ‘official jargon’ typical of totalitarian systems. The ideology has a dual component – archaic and utopian – that is, at once naturalistic and scientistic. In very Platonic terms, ‘the world must be rebuilt from the ground up to become itself once more’.

And so begins the ‘waltz of prohibitions’. In describing the vast and menacing array of this new mass radicalism, the author takes pleasure in identifying ten schools of thought, each with its own followers. These range from the more traditional ‘revolutionaries’ (that is, the Marxist orphans and failures of the 1970s) to the far more tragic ‘destroyers’ and ‘nihilists’ (De Saussure, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault); from the ‘redeemers’ (Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, Baudrillard, Barthes) to the ‘ephemeral’ (Warhol, Vattimo, Lyotard, Gadamer); from the ridiculous ‘apocalyptic’ (Pasolini, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky) to the decidedly comical ‘post-humans’, and so on.

The anecdote about Fertilio’s meeting with Michel Foucault, in the editorial office of a publishing house, way back in 1976, is particularly fascinating: “I was struck by the intensity of the aggression and contempt I felt being hurled in my face (…) as if he had sensed, many decades in advance, that our irreconcilable differences would have some consequence. Namely, this book”.