The hidden ideology behind the Euro-global directives

Or is it only not seen, heard, grasped?

Introducing his 1949 Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.

https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/lideologia-nascosta-dietro-le-direttive-euro-globali/

But how is our life, the surrounding reality, the natural world, housing, working and social conditions changing under the directives of the European Union and its conditional funding? Roundabouts everywhere, cycle paths even where they are not needed, synthetic food and GMO products to replace zero kilometer agriculture and natural product chains with international food chains, censored wine and health and food bigotry, health lines determined more by the pharmaceutical industry that from the protection of public health, halter regulations for beach concessions to replace the current local managers with multinationals of the sea, onerous obligations for renovations and standardization of homes according to Euro-global directives, also to discourage real estate ownership;

I am quoting haphazardly, certainly skipping other significant passages, interventions on different levels but which lead towards the same result: the landscape in which we live is becoming unrecognizable, our living conditions are distorted, the artificial is taking the place of the natural, the tradition and civilization, custom and real life give way to a uniform, global landscape, designed by technology with the support of ideology and medical, legal, environmental prescriptions. And European funding, the pnrr and the mes, give a maximum boost in that direction, replacing real priorities with prefabricated and delocalized growth models. If we then add migratory flows to all this, then the process of estrangement from our habitat becomes even more alienating.

Behind this whole process, there is an ideological thread that holds these scattered interventions together: that mix of dirigisme and liberalism, a corrective and substitutive vision of reality which is today the new Euro-global ideology . Dirigisme because it claims to correct everything that was previously free, spontaneous, customary, natural and traditional, left to the initiative of individuals, communities of territories. Liberal because the final paradigm remains economic profit, referring to multinational subjects and international speculation, through technocratic efficiency, global forms, the interdependence of countries and economies and the blackmail of sovereign debt.

****

The idol is a thing made by man’s hands, yet one before which he bows down as if he were the slave and the work of his hands were the master. When he does so he is not fully alive, because he makes himself the worshipper of a thing, that which is ‘not-life’. Instead of being an open system, with the possibility for an unforeseeable evolution, the idolater makes himself into a closed system, as closed as the image he worships. (…) ― We worship the work of our hands and the circumstances made by us (…).What are these idols? The organization, the state, power, the „future“, unlimited consumption, and even God has been transformed into an idol.― (1968f: The Condition of the American Spirit. Are We Fully Alive?, in: Newsday, Garden City, 13. 1. 1968.).