Economics, talent of thinking

 …There is no marital union!” The assessment of king Creon¹

In the picture "La paix", by Pablo Picasso (1952).  His celebratory thinking is not convincing us, so compulsively repetitive and bored by an artist who however was already at the peak of success.

This short interview was born from a curiosity to explore some ideas offered by Dr. Roberto Zanni during a recent public conversation about ‘narcissism’.

Marina Bilotta – An eight year old boy, who watches in admiration an anti-hero – you said Renato Vallanzasca – then a real man, not a cartoon character, really accused of crimes and murders, and really sentenced to criminal penalties by state justice. However is a man that many talked about, he was written about on the newspapers, he himself was interviewed for television, saying : “Vallanzasca is Vallanzasca!” What would this man have more, maybe looked upon with fear by the people talking about him on the street, compared to the ‘classic’ hero who spends himself for Justice?

Roberto Zanni – I start from a personal memory : as a child, just when I was eight years old, I used to spend the summer afternoons together with a friend of mine : often we played with toy soldiers and much of the game consisted in preparing for confrontation, each one building his own village, his own fort, his own army; then followed the battle and the count of the dead and wounded to decide who won.

One day, maybe because strategies and game modes were out (but more likely our thinking was breaking through), we decided as mutually agreed to ‘play for peace’ : the play, however, didn’t start.

1 The peace which bores.

With ‘peace’ nothing happened : the red man went hunting for bison and heartily greeted the cowboy intent on tending his herd. It was flat calm.

When Heraclitus, in that famous fragment, says that “Polemos is the father of all the things, and of all the things is the king” is careful : a king, infact, rules by means of laws, and the law for Heraclitus is the conflict, the dialectic of opposites which, as dynamic, would explain the totality of things (‘father of all things’, as a matter of facts).

But, if everything is war what is peace ? As an adult I would have guessed that thinking of peace is as arduous as thinking of mental health. What do heroes, positive and negative, good and bad,                   have to do with all this ? Yet they do, because also the so-called ‘good’ heroes are violent, with the difference that they resort to force ‘for good’…

Sure, you can think of personalities like Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi : very different men but united by the repudiation of violence – I’m simplifying – but violence, perpetrated or suffered, there is always : if this is the perspective Manzoni is right when he writes in ‘Adelchi’ : “All that remains is to hurt or suffer it”. Violence, conflict, clash seem then unavoidable : the theme of peace comes up again; it’s difficult to think of it as if not lack of motion and enterprise, that is as ecstatic bliss.

The friend and aret critic Mario Cancelli pointed out to me that, for example, when Picasso painted ‘The peace’ he represented different characters on a lawn, and you don’t understand well how they do… Do they play ? Do they enjoy ? And about what ? They look like jerks to me… The alternative would seem then to be between destruction (war) and inertia (peace) : the bad guys would be the brawlers and the good ones are those who do nothing. However the bad guys, while staying evil, would give a jolt : if unfortunately this ‘jolt’ ends in pushing into a ravine, that opens to the question of violence as a product of impotence (on this subject I defer to the question that follows).

When I was a child, without being bad, I claim my ‘sym-pathy’ for the bad guys, for those ones who unmasked the hypocrisy of goodness : I felt, like all children, the ‘goodness’ as a ‘reaction-formation’, or that the good ones… are not good!

At the secondary school, for example, I was impressed by the biographical insight reported in my Histroy book, on Caesar Borgia : a ruthless man but whose I appreciated the brutal unveiling of religious embroideries from the balance of forces among men. Of course, I didn’t spend my childhood to worship evil heroes, but as a child I really appreciated the relationships, and I brightly remember my repulsion for the moralistic sermons.

I was looking for a solution which was not an act of violence of my ‘heroes’, I just needed to think through themselves. Giacomo Contri pointed out the solution : a peace not by mysticism, but by juridical way.

Peace infact is a product, not a landing : if we don’t think so we’ll go on to mimic the fight between good and bad ones. If war, as a matter of facts, is the only way for relationships and the peace is the absence of war… It follows that peace is absence of relationships.

But is it really so ?

While we think about it would be nice to find out what the good guys will do, once they defeated the bad ones.

Marina Bilotta – May we call ‘fascination’ this special and widespread admiration, not among youngest ? When did you realize that it was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’, why did you decide to drop it ?

2 One’s thinking or a fascination hobbyhorse.

Roberto Zanni – Your question open stoa distinction : mine was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’. Fascination dropped because it wasn’t a ‘hobbyhorse’ (ad-mirare in Latin language) : it was just a moment of my intellectual work to try to get over the question of ‘satisfaction’, whose even ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ – when it ends well – can be intermediate steps.

The problem is when ‘thinking’ does not hold, does not govern and, on the opposite, rushes into action and pushes into the ravine. Violence infact is only capable of destroying because it is rooted in impotence, whose the heroes ‘super powers’ are the back side; I say again Giacomo Contri’ statement : “Between impotence and overbearing there is a hole which has not yet been filled”.

3 Work or not.

Marina Bilotta – Narcissism, you said, doesn’t match ‘work’ : on the contrary, it would allow, while staying still, to bend the other because narcissism doesn’t need working with a partner, it’s just an original quality. “Je suis belle” is a famous and dramatic statue by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who imagines woman always repulsive towards her partner. Then, is it worth working or not ? When can we say that a child is working ?

Roberto Zanni – A healthy child always works, for him everything can be work. It is in any early psychopathology that a child stops working and begins to be a difficult child : and to think that everything was easy before…

About that, adults responsibilities are not to be forgiven : see the so-called ‘bullies’ into the schools : they are already into the narcissism, even we’ve stirred it up.

We tell to a child or a teenager when he commits vandalism that he ‘is’ a bully! Instead of sanction him we categorize him.

If ‘I am’ a bully I don’t need to work : “just the way I am!” At most he will be re-ducated : and the education often is sadism on sadism…

I looked at a banquet on the street for collecting signatures to reintroduce the hour of ‘Civic education’ in the school : wrong! Civic education is not to be taught, it applies!

Nobody charges  - then no one sanctions – but Projects are organized on lawfulness, while it is the Law itself to be disavowed infact! If I only could I would reduce the age of majority to 12 years old :  age : all criminally liable for their own actions !

5  Never-ending unsatisfaction.

Finally, the question of ‘work’ you introduce, make me think that a narcissist doesn’t know what to do with a partner : so he thinks about bending him, or her to an obedience without satisfaction. Then we can also say that a narcissist doesn’t know what do about the satisfaction itself.

A coarse but effective saying I sometimes heard is : ‘suck the nail’. That also will be the destiny of a  beauty who makes ‘the beauty’…!

I note in the margin that ‘destiny’ is an aftermath of narcissism².

                              A cura di Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 25, 2018

1 Tribute to ‘THINK !’ October 27-28, 2018, "Alleanza", by Giacomo B. Contri.

2 Roberto Zanni is a teacher in "Philosophy", also member of "Studium Cartello – Il lavoro psicoanalitico", and a psychoanalyst himself in Bologna.

‘Speed Book Date‘, edited by Alessandra Pagani.

Padoa - February 24, 2018 : I've told about ‘Il capitale nel XXI secolo’, by Thomas Piketty - Ed. du Seuil 2013.

"Thomas Piketty is 46, lives in Paris with his wife Julia and their three daughters. He's professor at the 'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales' and at the 'Ecole d'Economie de Paris'. With this essay he won in 2013 the Prix 'Yrjo Jahnsson' awarded by the 'European Economic Association'. 

It is a work ambitious indeed, however it is original and strict by which Piketty begins an analysis still unpublished, because it collected Balance sheets from 20 Countries in the world, with a very actual issue : what favours the speculation, leading to social inequalities and injustice, other than to capital investments ?

That made me curious, because his work pointed out an important connection between the good economics and the individual psyche, continuously tempted by a consumer pleasure, or by an immediate obtaining without any work rather than  investing one's own talents for a better profit. 

Piketty said that a speculative shifting has first of all be dealt with in any Nation, by means of a shared Culture, and in the same time he proposed a progressive taxation on capital – but the politics has not so much been aimed by Governments, because that would encourage a capital migration to Countries where instead the speculation is awarded.

I think it would be useful to be able to define the composition of the capital, as Piketty himself  does hope and his work goes on with further allied in further Countries, because when the percentage of income doesn't overcome the capital invested in productive activities, maybe a progressive taxation on the capital will not have depressing effects.“

                               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 27, 2018

Any load, if you like, can move over.

Investment or debt is a ‘basic‘ of any company policy (and individual too), and fairly conveyed into Economics. Economic science, infact, since its quite recent birth, could time by time select the most profitable paths beginning from an individual thought getting to satisfaction.

 In other words, Economics became science thanks to any contribution of its best workers : a quite rare case of a cooperative with profit based on a preceeding fruitfulness, and not on scarcity. What still allows to the economic science to capitalize and, immediately after, to reinvest successfully the surplus into so different scientific fields and without unuseful dispersions. 

Freud himself collected in the last years of his very excellent both personal and professional career the promising wails of a newborn-baby science to cultivate as a whole.[1] 

 In his recent, interesting article on ‘Le Monde‘[2] Thomas Piketty, professor at ‘PSE - Paris School of Economics (o EEP - Ecole d'economie de Paris), faces the item of profitability in the difference of positions among partners which turns out to be winner, but which the Countries - European or extra European - have difficulty to acknowledge in their political decisions.

 Well supported by numerical and graphical amounts, Piketty authorizes himself to look at the ‘cost‘ which U.S.A. and Germany, though capable enough of a satisfactory index of productivity still rising them to the peak of the most developed Nations, have to correct downwards their internal wealths. 

In these Nations infact labor policy is technical more than economical, i.e. it disregards the ‘cultural‘ variables which influence any individual productivity restraining or favouring it, so that a greater number of work-hours for person is necessary to produce the same result. 

It is like saying that a person with a limited time available for himself, or herself, comes close to a mere performer though technically competent, but with a lower productivity nationwide too. 

Piketty specifically ascribes a weak economical growth to a scarce educational and cultural offer, or worse driven from outside, which ends up putting only into a political and social cost and doesn’t give rise to investments oriented, as we know, to a profit. I’ve found in what prof. Piketty exposed an interesting link with the difficulty of a normal child but crowded round by his, or her adults requests, without any time to work out his own, or her own capability to answer and consequently to work well, who risks indeed to go toward psychopathology… 

He then could think convenient to work in order to recover his own, or her own economical thought so precocious and productive which, from the fetal darkness and in that scarcity of nourishment, drove him, or her to the satisfaction of birth. 

                                                        Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 9, 2017

[1]S.Freud, "La questione economica del masochismo" 1924 – OSF Vol.10 B.Boringhieri

2 Thomas Piketty, "De la productivitè en France et en Allemagne", Le Monde 5 gennaio 2017, @pikettylemonde on Twitter.

3 Piketty indicates the ratio between  Gross Domestic Product and the number of total hours  worked in the Country, also referred to the number of workers employed, as a valid indicato of productivity of the Nation.

[2]

"The young Columbus" by Giulio Monteverdi[2].

Monteverdi and his profitable intuition of a sculptor who digs into the success of a man and regains to chance as an adult, from the child who precedes.

Here it is then a young Christopher Columbus[3], thoughtful without sadness, and unaware – as it seems – about his own sane sensuality, autonomy and determination of thinking which make him charming, but also distancing any shadow and greed.

What is infact more distant from a psychic pathology than the capacity, all human, to start a project, which generally we call 'work', also picking up from childhood a difficult wish, but not for that less valid, to imagine it feasible at the adults age and their attractive world ?

A world made of rules, but also  of 'power' which so makes it an enlarged world and universe.

Power to move, power to form alliances and to make them pay off, power to build something that as a child stopped at play.

Power to use reality with a more adequate competence, when as a child he had to ask for help the adult by whom he couldn't but depend,  even if with gratitude when adults deserved.

What's more then to 'chance' of adulthood – maybe is reasoning the young Christophore Columbus by Monteverdi – who lets adolescence slip away as a too long dress, too slow, too expensive, too... ??

He is already profitably investing in studies, in disciplines, in new hugs which are no just play. 'The young Columbus' is the beauty of reality which is not eternal.

                                             Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – September 20,  2016

[1]               "The teenager"(1875) is a famous novel by Fedor Dostoevski about the inability to go over the adolescence.

[2]    Giulio Monteverdi, sculptor and politician (Bistagno 1837 – Roma 1917). "Il Colombo giovinetto" is a statue in marble of  1870 eand stands in the De Albertis Castle at Genoa.

[3]    Cristoforo Colombo (Genova 1451 – Valladolid 1506), Italian explorer and navigator, was a sailorman since a child. Citizen of Genoa Republic, and then subject of Castiglia Realm, he grew the idea of an existing land overseas which  brought him, after ups and downs and an adventurous travel, to reach the actual San Salvador on October 12, 1492.