Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
THEThe crash of the Californian banking institution Silicon Valley Bank, which is rocking the global economy, brought to mind at least two events. The “subprime mortgage” crisis, started by the big American banks in 2007, which generated a systemic crisis, and the most recent Covid pandemic.
Something seems to unite the two events: the cult of magical thinking. Or what is most commonly summed up in the expression: “Everything will be fine”. Which is what the bankers of the early 2000s said, involving families who took out a simple mortgage, in investments in the notorious derivatives.
When the bubble burst, their optimism proved disastrous. It was understood that the “animal spirits” could not be left free to believe in themselves: rules were needed. Which were launched, in the US as in Europe, with greater control over the banking system.
Except for the return to unbridled liberalism, typical of Donald Trump’s presidency in the Stateslimited them, with the effects we see.
What does the pandemic have to do with it? Precisely in these days, in which the investigations into its management reconstruct its modalities, we see errors and missteps, some of which seem to have been dictated by the trust that everything was going well, which is what was obsessively repeated in the early days.
There is something beautiful and magical about believing that positive thinking produces an energy that changes things. And perhaps there is also some truth. Our society has embraced this vision of reality with conviction, and it was also seen at the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, when we thought of a blitzkrieg.
But optimism can do nothing if it is not accompanied by a minimum of realism. Recently, having to face an unexpected negative event, I understood that sometimes the cult of positive thinking leads us to underestimate the dangers and to postpone taking remedies.
And I smiled realizing that even in Jovanotti’s song, a manifesto of my generation, next to the phrase “I think positive because I’m alive and as long as I’m alive” another one stands out: “Nothing and no one in the world can stop me from thinking”. Precisely.
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