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Review: THE PRESS Tuttolibri

The shipwreck of the Robinson Daily

The disconnected from others, excluded, rejected, ignored, a normal condition, more and more widespread in our lives that marks the relationship and the fate of persons , winning or losing

Marco Belpoliti
happens to many to become suddenly, from one day to another, both men and women invisible, other people refuse to see. As told in his novel Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1953), reprinted recently by Einaudi, the invisibility depends on a stigma, a sign that the protagonist has to himself: he is a black man in American society of the fifties. But you need not be marked by a stigma so obvious, it takes little things, events or aspects minimum, because the shots of the exclusion mechanism, and it is rejected or ignored. It happened to everyone, and no apparent reason, to find the edge of the child's group of friends: a party which has not been invited, the phone does not ring more, a sentence that nasty during recess at school, friends not salute.

Adriano Zamperini, a professor of social psychology, described in a book, entitled The ostracism - to be released by Einaudi (pp. 246, and 18) - This condition usual, if not constant in our lives, that way of being off-line, disconnected from the others, which marks the social relations, and sometimes even the fate of people: winners and losers.

Zamperini began with an observation: we live in a schizophrenic society, on the one hand, strongly encourages the independence and autonomy of individuals (the self-sufficiency of the ego), and second, continuously indicates the risk of being cut off from others, even for a short time. However, we know that, although it is innate in us the need to be accepted, not to receive waste, the life course is punctuated by large and small exclusions. The extension fabric of relations the explosion of the Web (e-mail, Skype, social networks, twitter, etc..) But there is now linked to a virtual close relationship with our neighbor, a clear sign of a spasmodic need to be recognized by others. Yet

imposes an entropic factor: each of us can support only a limited number of niches, relational, and when you decide to spend time with someone, it undermines the possibility of being with someone else, not to mention that many reports - affection, friendship, romantic - require commitment, and those who do not receive the necessary attention to become unsustainable.

This simple fact, however, that many do not, in itself explains the reasons that provoke ostracism, or suffer, more or less close in the circle of human relationships. Often adolescents, real sick of cyberspace, to fret if you do not receive immediate responses to their e-mail, if the silence suddenly descends into a chat conversation. Why not respond? What has happened? What did I say? Sometimes these incidents of passengers, sometimes of actual episodes of cyberostracismo: ignore the other with the silence in the Internet, or do not respond to text messages and mobile phone. The cultural pressure for self-assertion is now so strong that it becomes difficult to face the danger of being ignored in these reports in chat. But there is only this type of waste. The experience of being rejected apply to other aspects of our daily lives; aggression implied or otherwise, is present mainly in schools.

Zamperini Bracey cites the case of Poppy, a British student of 13 years, blonde hair, big eyes, face makeup. Girl beautiful, too beautiful, for this reason is discriminated against by their classmates: gossip, silence, grimaces, grins, eyes that offend. Every day at school becomes a torture for her, and even phone calls begin with false requests to pose for a fashion shoot. Eventually Poppy hangs himself in his room. An episode

extreme, of course, but it bears witness to a traumatic condition widespread. In the final part of the book focuses on Zamperini very well known case of Columbine, Colorado, where in 1999 two boys of 18 and 17 years fire on their classmates, killing 13, before committing suicide. An episode that is connected, the psychologist writes, the rituals of exclusion, ostracism, to the anger and the madness that relationships between peers, united and altered states of mind can also produce.

Not always, however, the experience of rejection reactions generate reckless, and this is because we trained during adolescence to receive small or large repulse love, and it is good that you guys should make a kind of apprenticeship marked by waste, rejections more o meno dolorosi, per poter in seguito pervenire «a una più accurata valutazione del proprio valore relazionale».

Alla fine della lettura di questo testo torna in mente l'analisi che Primo Levi in Se questo è un uomo dedica ai sommersi e ai salvati nel Lager. Egli nota che nella vita comune non accade spesso che un uomo si perda, poiché normalmente non si è soli, e nel suo scendere ognuno di noi risulta saldamente legato al destino dei propri vicini.

Dopo aver letto L'ostracismo ci si può chiedere se nella società individualista e narcisista attuale questo sia ancora vero, se cioè siamo davvero così legati gli uni agli altri, da non dover far subire a nessuno il destino del «sommerso». The illusion of the autonomy of the individual, together with the need to be online, has gone so far that the exclusion is one of the major sources of suffering of individuals. It affects the most vulnerable: children, youth, disabled, "different", and ostracism is a practice so widespread as to cause a lot of extra work trying to stay balanced.

What we lost in terms of cohesion, as a coercive and authoritarian, there was, in the end returned to the floor of the release of its self. All of a sudden it could happen to become the Fantozzi, to which the analyst of insurance, mangled the name, can say, "accountant Puppets, she does not have any inferiority complex! She is less. " Often the alternative is between become social chameleons, Zelig of human interactivity and conformist perfect, or develop the psychology of Robinson Crusoe to survive the sinking of everyday social relations. A meager result of all the technological and economic progress.

(source: Tuttolibri, on sale Saturday, October 16)

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