Critica della vittima (Criticism of the victim), by Daniele Giglioli, will be one of the most interesting essays I have read in recent years. The premise is based on an unpolitically correct premise: that the hero of our time has become a victim, because being a victim in the world in which we live grants prestige, demands that a very powerful machinery be heard and activated to generate identity, rights and self-esteem. “Immunize against any criticism,” adds Giglioli; and not only that: “It ensures innocence beyond any reasonable doubt. (...) The victim has not done it, they have done it; he does not act, he suffers”.

This book that looks at how victimizing thought appears in many aspects of life can help understand why in recent days, conspiracy theories linked to the coronavirus crisis are multiplying. Surely the reader has already received four or five articles, including a fake that has been published as an analysis of Noam Chomsky, and perhaps also some video, although it is quite well edited, that says that behind what is happening are the pharmaceutical multinationals, Bill Gates or the secret services of the United States. Moreover, there has also been a theory that everything has been created by the media, since today the media to disseminate hallucinated hypotheses are within anyone’s reach.

If those theories are true or false, it's not a very interesting debate. Perhaps it is more important that its dissemination is about those who disseminate this type of information and, more generally, about our society and the agents who want to change it.

Giglioli studies the phenomenon of layered conspiracy theories. The superficial explanation in the first place: the world has become very complex and the philosophies and ideologies that intended to explain in a rational way have been in crisis for a long time; it goes without saying that the movements that intend to transform, rather than explain history. There's no compass. The weakest cannot bear it, and they wonder who is to blame. “Conspiracy obsession is a false rationalization,” says Giglioli. “And all that remains is to laugh or sympathize with what asks “Who offends me?”, as the cyclops did with Polifemo. No one hurts you, let us sleep.”

But that would be to stay on the surface, aside from the inner layers of the conspiratorial onion, the juicest. The author of the book Criticism of the victim says that one should not completely rule out anyone who believes in the plot. “Polyphene, despite the mistakes, was a little right: someone had nailed something to him in the eye.” Although conspiracy theories are evidence of a distorted rationality, in these kinds of stories there is still a barrage of the ability of human beings to change history, which emerged as a losing and victimizing attitude – because all those theories, in the end, say that ordinary citizens have no chance of doing anything, which are done by the gigantic and invisible powers that have represented the omnipotent god.

“The maniacs of the plot and the spokesmen of the victims show what they hide, they say what they deny, they look carefully, although they cannot see it: in their surrender there is an indication of struggle; when they refuse they leave a trail of desire; in the pride that is mistaken, they show the shining sign of a legitimate pride. Reading backwards, his fallacy is the language of truth,” says Giglioli. In other words, the person who says that the coronavirus has been spread by an international secret agency to dominate the world should be taken as a symptom. It is someone who does not want to believe the signals emitted by an increasingly undemocratic social model. The problem is that it doesn't have the tools to transform this skepticism into transformative energy.

And that's not just a defeat for the conspiracy. Journalists, intellectuals or academics, all the educated, critical and progressive people, who laugh above all when they hear this kind of delusional explanation, if you look carefully, can be seen in the mirror of that failure.

This exceptional situation that we are experiencing should serve, among many other things, to see the short way in which precise, credible and rational explanations of the phenomena around us are made. And also to do something to make this change. Giglioli opposes “the right to do” to “be fair” of the victim. One of the keys to dealing with the next crisis is to move from what they do to what we do, following the example of the surveillance groups that are being organised in recent days. Anyone who sees that his life improves with Community practice may believe that things can be otherwise. Community texture is the best antidote for paranoid plot.