There is nothing to be understood from them

 The possibility that some positive suggestions may come from the vast majority of ‘young people’ in today’s Italy is definitely to be ruled out. When these people claim that they are misunderstood, the only answer they deserve is that there is nothing to be understood from them: if a normal order existed, it would only be a matter of curtly putting them in their place, as one might do with children, when their foolishness becomes annoying, intrusive, or impertinent. Just what their non-conformism, ‘protest’, or ‘revolt’ amounts to is all too clear. It has nothing to do with the sporadic anarchists of a few decades ago, who at least were capable of thinking, and were familiar with the likes of Nietzsche and Stirner; 159  or with those who, in terms of art or worldview, enthusiastically embraced Futurism, Dadaism, or the Sturm und Drang 160  promoted by the early Papini. 161  The ‘rebels’ of today are ‘longhairs’ and Beats whose non-conformism is of the cheapest kind, and no matter how banal it may be, it follows a trend, a new norm. It does so in a passive, provincial way, since the Beatnik or hipster movement is already a thing of the past in America. Besides, it had produced a few literary echoes, and had taken some dangerous, destructive turns; but this is hardly the case in Italy, where intellectual deficiency and illiteracy are paramount.

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On the other hand, there is no doubt that as the years go by, and the need emerges for most of them to face the material and economic problems of life, these ‘youths’, as adults, will adapt to professional, productive, social, and matrimonial routines — simply switching from one form of nothingness to another. So no real problem emerges.

It would be unfair, however, to reduce all European youths to those just described. Apart from young people who are happy to go along with the bourgeois flow with little scruple or distress, in Italy there are young people whose revolt has a political aspect. They are rebelling against the current democratic regime and are even actively taking to the streets, with courage, when it is a matter of repelling the provocative demonstrations of Leftist factions. They attest to the presence of a different Italy and, what’s more, some of them are even receptive towards the ideas and disciplines which we usually refer to as ‘traditional’, in a particular sense of the word. Thus, in regard to these young people one can no longer speak of ‘rebels without a flag’, nor of foolish copycat non-conformism.

The main problem that emerges in the case of these young people concerns the distinction between purely biological youth and that of a spiritual nature, which is superior to the former. Youths of good stock often display positive attitudes in terms of what we would describe, not as ‘idealism’ — since this term is so misused nowadays — but as a certain capacity for enthusiasm and vigour, unconditional devotion, steadfastness, and detachment from bourgeois life and purely material, self-seeking interests, combined with an aspiration for higher freedom. It is important to realise that these inclinations are ultimately biologically conditioned, which is to say connected to age. The task, then, would be to assimilate these inclinations and make them one’s own so that they may become permanent qualities and counter the opposite influences to which one becomes fatally exposed with the passing of the years, and the need to face the concrete problems of contemporary life.

In this respect, it may be interesting to provide a reference drawn from the ancient Arab-Persian civilisation. The term futâva , from fatà = ‘young man’, was used to describe the quality of ‘being young’ precisely in the spiritual sense just noted, one defined on the basis not of age, but primarily of a special disposition of the spirit. Thus, the fityân or fityûh (= ‘the young’) came to be conceived as an Order whose members would undergo a rite connected to a kind of solemn vow always to maintain this quality of ‘being young’.

The above reference first of all suggests what task young people should set themselves, if they profess a positive form of non-conformism and rebellion: by our own personal experience, we know of far too many cases in which, after biological youth had faded, spiritual youth, too, with its higher interests, more or less ceased to exist and was replaced by a banal ‘normalisation’. Regrettably, by the age of thirty or thereabouts, very few people continue to stand their ground. Secondly, the above reference may also help to put an end to the myth of ‘youth’. The genuine quality of youth can in no way be attributed to that generation we mentioned at the beginning of the present essay (and that is why we have put the words ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ in inverted commas). Rather, in regard to that generation, one might speak of the childishness of its psychical retardation. And when what we are dealing with is not a human element, which from the beginning reflects the disease of a disintegrating civilisation, which is to say in the best cases, what Benedetto Croce once said holds perfectly true: a young person’s only problem is to grow into an adult. The rest is nonsense, and those concerned with serious matters ought to focus on the problem of taking a stance vis-à-vis our society and civilisation as a whole, in the name of a true, radical, reconstructive revolution.