(Text published in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, 30 April 2021)

Originally published on www.quodlibet.it, translated using Google Translate

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Lemmings are small rodents, about 15 centimeters long, that live in the tundras of northern Europe and Asia. This species has the particularity of suddenly undertaking collective migrations for no apparent reason that end with a mass suicide in the waters of the sea. The enigma that this behavior has posed to zoologists is so singular that they, after trying to provide explanations that have proved insufficient, have preferred to remove it. But one of the most lucid minds of the twentieth century, Primo Levi questioned the phenomenon and provided a convincing interpretation of it. We take it for granted that all living beings wish to continue living: in lemmings for some reason this will has failed and the instinct that drove them to live has turned into a death instinct.

I believe that something similar is happening today to another species of living beings, what we call homo sapiens. Collective suicide occurs here – as befits a species that has replaced instinct with language and an endosomatic impulse with a series of devices external to the body – in an artificial and complicated way, but the result could be the same. Human beings cannot live if they do not give themselves reasons and justifications for their lives, which in every age have taken the form of religions, myths, political beliefs, philosophies and ideals of all kinds. These justifications seem today – at least in the richest and most technologized part of humanity – and men find themselves perhaps for the first time reduced to their pure biological survival, which, it seems, they prove unable to accept. This alone can explain why, instead of assuming the simple, lovable fact of living side by side, we felt the need to instill an implacable sanitary terror, in which life without any more ideal justifications is threatened and punished at every moment by disease and death. And this alone can explain that, although the industries that produce them have stated that it is not possible to predict the effects of vaccines in the long term, because it has not been possible to comply with the foreseen procedures and that the tests on genotoxicity and carcinogenicity will only end in October. by 2022, millions of people were subjected to an unprecedented mass vaccination.