Today we are going to make Italians mad. And no, we will not be breaking spaghetti – something that my Italian family has been doing for generations, no, centuries, before TikTok videos started circulating claiming that Italians don’t break spaghetti. We do, in fact, break our spaghetti, just like any sane person with a functioning brain would do when the spaghetti clearly doesn't fit into the pot. I actually used to sometimes not break my spaghetti, but now I always do so out of spite: it gives me both physical and emotional pleasure to know that the Italian gods are frowning upon my heartless breaking of spaghetti.
As much as I would love to talk about how only people living in a hopeless country could get brutally angry about other people’s freedom to break spaghetti, and how this relates to Italy still being a fundamentally fascist-loving country at heart, the topic I suggest for today is the following: the link between Italians loving the big state and Italy having experienced fascism.
First of all, for those who are not in the know, Italians love a good nanny state. There is an intrinsic maternal instinct behind their desire for a caring, overarching, all-encompassing nanny state. Or should I say, mommy state. Mamma state, last offer.
Italians love the mamma state so much that the ultimate aspiration for the average Italian is to forever be employed by the mamma state: getting a “posto fisso” (a permanent job) working for the government is the Italian dream – in a similar way to what becoming a successful billionaire would be for an American. The fact that the expression “posto fisso” evokes emotions of joy in people’s minds is a testament to how bad the labour market is in the country. And the fact that dreaming about a permanent job for the state is the culmination of people’s aspirations is sad, but also very telling. Italy’s cult for the state runs deep.
It’s unclear to me when Italy started worshipping the state. Was it before or after people started breaking spaghetti? Nobody can tell. But for sure there was a time (ah, quando c’era lui!) when Italy’s state peaked in ubiquity: I am talking of course about the current government fascism. To be specific, I’m talking about the fascist movement from the 20th century – Italy has been unlucky enough to have experienced dictators before, and for some reason some of them were celebrated by having salads named after them (I’m looking at you, Julius Caesar).
Anyway, fascism. I won’t explain how the state took over every aspect of people’s lives, because thankfully Wikipedia has a whole page about that. The sad truth is that a dictator found fertile ground in a country with a taste for strong leadership and an incurable hope in a state that solves the problems people can’t.
What is worse is that although Italy miraculously redeemed itself during WW2 with a trick nobody had seen before, it never quite went through the cultural journey of brainwashing re-education that was necessary to truly abandon fascism – a painful process that Germany on the other hand was rightly forced to endure.
Fast forward to present-day Italy, people are still charmed by strong leadership. If an Italian is faced with a problem, their first reaction is “How can the state solve this for me?”, rather than the more American approach, “How can I solve this?”. Expecting the state to solve every problem anyone has ever had is quintessentially Italian. Nobody wants to pay taxes, of course, but everyone demands that the state intervene in just about everything to “fix” whatever is wrong. It is not a coincidence that Italy’s debt to GDP is one of the highest in Europe – and the world.
Sure, money has been mismanaged and wasted over the years. But you don’t get to 140% debt-to-GDP ratio simply by making a few mistakes here and there. Italy is culturally broken because Italians have unreasonable expectations of the state. Italy needs a cultural revolution that puts freedom, including free markets (something I’m afraid we’ll never see in Italy), at its centre. With that said, I won’t be holding my breath to see any kind of positive change in this direction.
P.S.: The Caesar salad is not named after Julius Caesar.
