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Narrative Capitals/10 - The challenge to prevent the transformation of the ideal into ideology
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire  on 14/01/2018
“And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners (the people bound inside the cave) are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light... ...do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them (among the prisoners - the tr.)? ...I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. ...would he not be ridiculous? ...and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.” 
Plato The Republic (English translation by Benjamin Jowett)
It is typical of ideological thinking - of every ideology but above all those of a religious nature - to create a dichotomic or gnostic type of representation of the world. Happiness, beauty, truth, and the special light of those who are inside that experience are exalted, and the ordinary happiness and beauty of those who are outside are devalued. Friendship, work, play, art and everyone's life are not enough anymore. There is a need to load these realities with additional, extraordinary and diverse meanings. And soon we end up no longer being able to rejoice in seeing a "friend and nothing more", of "just working and nothing more", of "just praying and that’s all", of "just painting and that’s all". We begin to believe that simple life is not enough to live. And while we are convinced that we live more than others, we risk ceasing to really live.
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This process of reducing the value of ordinary things in life is particularly important and relevant when dealing with people who have creative talents: artists, intellectuals, poets, philosophers, theologians... They are innovators, capable of primary and original creativity, which allows the charisma to remain generative. They are the charisma of the charisma. Ideal and charismatic communities, especially in the founding phase, attract people with special and artistic talents. There is a profound affinity between spiritual and artistic charismas, because both are voices that call, speak and guide from inside. At the same time, it is equally common that after the foundation phases many of the people with the greatest talents leave or burn out - and sometimes the artistic vocation is lost or extinguished with the loss of the ideal vocation, because over time the two voices have (almost) become one.
These unfortunate outcomes depend profoundly on the ability of the community (and its founders/leaders) to care for and respect the original talents of their people, not to sacrifice them on the altar of the institution's growth demands. They also depend from succeeding in winning over the natural avarice to use those talents and those fascinating people primarily for the ideal goals of the community. In communities, those who have received a gift of creativity and a spiritual vocation at the same time have the precious task of preventing the transformation of the ideal into ideology. Because the primary and direct contact with life that is typical (although not exclusive) of artists and intellectuals allows for that plurality and biodiversity which is the salvation of communities from the ideological drift. They are people who manage to say different things in different ways, and this original and primal diversity allows the ideals to remain genuine and alive. Artistic vocation, like the spiritual and charismatic one, is in fact an original, primitive and non-derived vocation. But it is not easy, albeit decisive, to understand that people can have more vocations, original and primary ones, without one of them necessarily having to die in order to make the other live. Identity grows well if one dimension of life does not become a monopoly. But all this is very risky, and so one ends up preferring people who are "reduced" but certain to those who are "whole" but uncertain.
Communities, especially spiritual and charismatic ones, usually do not want "artists and nobody else", they want and form artists and intellectuals totally dedicated to the service of the message. They do not believe that it is from "art and nothing else" that the special charismatic art that they feel the need for may flourish. And so they think of obtaining a different art by orienting the first natural vocation to the second ideal one. They do so in various ways. Sometimes simply by preventing them from cultivating the violin, literature, dance or their studies, so that they can dedicate all their vital and spiritual energies to the new "vocation". At other times, and these are the most interesting cases to be analysed, they ask them to subordinate their talent and creativity to the aims of the community and its message. Previously they sculpted flowers and reliefs; now only crucifixes and angels.
They take them away from normal environments belonging to everyone that are mixed and diverse, where real life grows, and they put them on a vacuum-sealed pedestal to give glory to the community and its charisma, maybe to God, through their works. Art and culture thus become ideological production, where the message "devours" art and thought (and God), for lack of gratuitousness and freedom - history offers us abundant evidence of this. From being primary, the artistic-intellectual vocation becomes secondary and ancillary.
Artists can serve their communities if they are able to remain directly connected to the deep layers of the earth that are different from those on which the charisma of the community draws. It is this different type of water that enriches everyone's water (and their own). If, on the other hand, one day the community decides to obstruct direct access to the different underground vein, and connects the artist to the only spring of all with a connecting tube, the whole common field loses nourishment and fertility. Artistic and originally creative vocations are a common good if they manage to bring waters that are different from that which flows abundantly from the fountain of the founders. And when the ideological virus takes hold, all the fountains of the community are connected to the only main aqueduct.
The narrative poverty of many ideal-driven organisations (IDO) does not depend only on the scarcity of narrative talents - and therefore of artists and intellectuals. It is not so much the lack of talent that blocks the development and attractiveness of ideal-driven communities in the generations that follow their foundation. The crisis is the result of the famine of "whole”, free and original artistic and intellectual vocations.
In these processes and scenarios, an important role is also played by the management and maintenance that the individual person makes of their artistic-intellectual vocation. After the first happy times (years) when the new "second call" absorbs any previous desire and fantasy, if growth is good there is a point when the conflict builds up between the individual voice and that of the community (which we analysed last Sunday, in the previous article). When (and if) the day of the "awakening" arrives, even the bearer of an artistic vocation is called to make a choice, just like and differently from all the other members. But the artist-intellectual has specific and very relevant responsibilities. If you choose the false type of authenticity, the damage it causes is profound and serious. All fictions are harmful in life and especially in the IDO-s; but few things are more harmful than fake artists and intellectuals. If, once freed from ideological chains, and having seen reality distinguishing it from its shadow, an artist returns to his chained comrades and instead of freeing them, chooses to bind himself again and then begins to speak of shadows as if they were reality, he begins to lose his soul and seriously compromises the good growth of the spirit of his community. Remaining in the ideology is an evil for everyone, but it is a mortal and death bringing evil for those who have had the gift of recognizing ideology but speak of it as if it were reality.
This is one of the many expressions of the phenomenon of false prophecy, very old and very serious, and for this reason it is described extensively by the biblical prophets. We find it again when the "prophet" decides (for weakness or for interests) to silence the voice that continues to inhabit him and instead begins to say the things the community and leaders want them to tell. And they become a false prophet (and soon the voice inside is extinguished). The community loses quality, biodiversity and generativity. And their charisma burns out. Alongside the false prophets who know that they are, there are others who are in good faith, either because they are still too "young" and therefore do not experience any tension in the soul between the two voices, or because they sincerely believe that they live their authenticity by voluntarily sacrificing their first vocation to the new (many of them, in reality, did not have an authentic vocation in the first place, but only assumed an artistic-intellectual job for themselves).
The quality of the present and future of these communities depends above all on the dynamics and evolution of the choices made by those artists-intellectuals who seek to remain faithful to the two primary vocations of their lives. They are in a particularly uncomfortable and painful position. They must be guardians of the "second vocation of the community" as well as the "first artistic vocation". But the custody of the first vocation is an individual and often solitary enterprise: there are no community instruments that protect it and very few helpers and counsellors who understand it. As time goes by, here too, the tension between the two voices grows, and the temptation to sacrifice the first to the second vocation becomes strong; a sacrifice that many would like and greet with a roaring applause. There is a need for infinite meekness so that plural vocations can continue to live and make people live.
The existence and resilience of a small number of people capable of being faithful to their two vocations is essential for the salvation of ideal-driven communities. Because the IDO that in its development consumes the most creative people that providence sent to write its new and beautiful pages does not generate any good new narrative capital. The biblical logic of the faithful "remnant" is at the root of the salvation of ideal-driven communities in times of exiles and of the destruction of temples. They will write and rewrite the first stories of the fathers, compose new spiritual songs and hymns, remember and preserve the first covenant and the first promise. To prepare the non-vain expectation of a new, marvellous alliance.
***
Today, our immersion in the narrative capitals of IDO-s and communities ends. There would be many other things to say, and perhaps we will say them in a forthcoming series of articles. From next Sunday we will return to immerse our hearts and thoughts in the Bible, with the commentary on the Books of Samuel and their infinite stories. Thanks, again, to those who have followed me through these ten episodes, to the many readers who have sent me valuable comments, criticisms and suggestions, to the generous trust granted to me by director Marco Tarquinio and Avvenire, allowing me to continue my humble and tenacious search for new, living words to love our time.
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Narrative Capitals/10 - The challenge to prevent the transformation of the ideal into ideology
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire  on 14/01/2018
“And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners (the people bound inside the cave) are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light... ...do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them (among the prisoners - the tr.)? ...I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. ...would he not be ridiculous? ...and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.” 
Plato The Republic (English translation by Benjamin Jowett)
It is typical of ideological thinking - of every ideology but above all those of a religious nature - to create a dichotomic or gnostic type of representation of the world. Happiness, beauty, truth, and the special light of those who are inside that experience are exalted, and the ordinary happiness and beauty of those who are outside are devalued. Friendship, work, play, art and everyone's life are not enough anymore. There is a need to load these realities with additional, extraordinary and diverse meanings. And soon we end up no longer being able to rejoice in seeing a "friend and nothing more", of "just working and nothing more", of "just praying and that’s all", of "just painting and that’s all". We begin to believe that simple life is not enough to live. And while we are convinced that we live more than others, we risk ceasing to really live.
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Narrative Capitals/8 - Founding and continuing without haste, just like equilibrists
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire  on 31/12/2017
When a truly original genius makes its appearance in the world, people make haste to get rid of it. To achieve this goal they have two methods. The first is elimination. In the event of failure, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and hideous): exaltation, putting it on a pedestal and transforming it into a "god".
Lu Xun, An Introduction to a The sayings of Confucius 
At the origins of many communities and movements there is an experience of intense and deep closeness, among all of the members and - in the first place - with the founders. It is an extended kind of intimacy that exalts and develops the intimacy of each person. This particular "relational good" attracts, fills and fascinates no less than the ideal message received and announced. The contact of hearts and bodies, the sharing of the same table where meals prepared together are eaten, the real hugs to the "lepers" that immediately become true and different hugs exchanged with each other upon returning home. These are radically anti-immunitarian experiences, precisely because the many forms of mediation that we have invented in order not to touch the "wound of the other” are not there yet.
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But this simple and universal proximity-fraternity is the first to risk disappearing when communities create a structure for themselves and become increasingly complex organizations. In this transformation of the nature of relationships, some of the most devious and bad viruses are nestled.
The evolution of relationships with the founders plays a key role. Soon after the first phase of fraternity and horizontality an increasing distance is created between the founders and other members, and the intimate proximity of the origin is progressively reduced. It becomes more and more difficult to see the founders simply in the midst of the community, to meet them in the street, to share ordinary life with them. And so, paradoxically, it is precisely the founders who are the first to emerge from the reciprocity-fraternity that is sincerely believed and proclaimed. Their different and unique role, which everyone recognizes, generates an invisible but very real and ever more impenetrable curtain around them, which produces a real and actual isolation that grows together and thanks to admiration, sincere love and the exaltation of their person.
And many ideal communities are intentionally transformed into immunitarian organizations, because with distance the experience of corporeality, contact, full human encounter and intimacy in relationships also disappears. We can speak and announce fraternity and equality, but if we do not embrace, quarrel and forgive each other mixing the flow of our tears, we are in the ideology of fraternity without entering into the experience of fraternity. The body, as Biblical humanism tells us, expresses concreteness, fragility, the entirety of life, it allows us to know the mystery of the person I am facing here and now. If I don't meet the other in their body, I see only an indistinct crowd, categories and classes of people, without being able to "see" Giovanna, Ivan, Luca. I “meet" but a ghost, even when it is a beautiful ghost. To recognize him I must be able to touch his wounds with my hands. Here lies the immense meaning of a word that becomes flesh.
This is why a first sign that a fraternal community is transforming itself into an immune organization is the decrease in the exposure of those responsible for it to the wounds (and blessings) of the simple fraternity of all.
This is how one affirms, day after day, one of the oldest and most universal taboos: “You can’t touch the king”. A taboo that comes from a powerful desire for the forbidden thing. The taboo is affirmed together with the growing of the distance from the founder, it is all the more difficult to "touch him". The growth of the myth is proportional to the decrease in encounters, hugs and kisses given to the lepers throughout the community - which, in rare cases of pathology, can also be accompanied by the abuse of bodies, a sick expression of the actual eclipse of the real body. The real antidote to this taboo would therefore be to maintain the intimacy and ordinary closeness between the founders and the whole community. But this is precisely the most difficult thing to avoid, because myths are nourished precisely by their being far from reality - an encounter and a look at the leader is as valuable as distant and unattainable he is (we also see this in case of the ‘myths’ of cinema and music).
These growing processes of isolation and untouchability have some inevitable and also some avoidable components, but the management of their avoidable part is decisive, also because some avoidable dimensions are interpreted as unavoidable. Among these, thinking that the distance and loss of intimacy with the founders depends on the quantitative growth of the community, without realizing that the first ones to become distant are those closest to the founder, because the "distance" is above all sacred and symbolic, not geographical. The "neighbour" is not the "next-door neighbour" - as the good Samaritan taught us.
The inevitable part is a consequence of the success of communities. The awareness of the uniqueness and value of the founder's person pushes members to do everything possible to protect them so as to save them from being "consumed” by the people around them. Furthermore, growth and development necessarily produce some form of structures and hierarchy, which by their nature and function combine poorly with what is needed for fraternity. This inevitably implies the emergence of a culture of distance that becomes immunity. This is a paradox as well known as it is neglected by the founders of charismatic communities and movements, who generally make great haste to start the phase of institutionalizing their groups (and even when they are abstractly aware of it they believe, deceiving themselves, that their story will be special and different and therefore will not run into the problems of others). A good warning to community founders could then be summed up as follows: instead of accelerating it, as you spontaneously do, try to do everything you can to slow down the process of transforming your community into an organization. Move yourself like the equilibrist (tightrope walker - the tr.), without haste. Do not get caught up by the call of the other end of the rope.
The avoidable factors concern the founder directly. First of all, it should resist with all its virtues the tenacious temptation of isolation, especially when it is about to start and is more easily visible. It should not stop being present by the tables where all people eat, in the masses, continuing to embrace and kiss the real poor, not only those of the stories. It shouldn't fall into the invisible trap of (always less and small) privileges, exemptions from the work and duties of everyone - like washing dishes, shopping, ironing shirts. Fraternity begins to become an ideology when it loses contact with chopping the onions and cleaning the toilets; when the desire to "give life" to the brothers does not become "swiping the floor” with a cloth.
It is very difficult for the founders not to fall into these forms of exemptions, which are the result of very good intentions, a great deal of love and an ignorance that is not guilty of the consequences. It is in fact the community that, in good faith, does everything to isolate its leader. It is Peter who does not want Jesus to wash his feet. But when another Peter succeeds in convincing his master and thus impedes the fraternity of hands and feet, the great and ancient taboo of the king's untouchability becomes, day after day, the real new tacit rule of the community. Few things isolate more from friends and companions than those that, instead of helping the founders/leaders to remain equal to all, make them increasingly different. Those, however, who have received a charisma of founding a community would have a vital need of honest friends who like them so much as to treat them as equals, because they understand that the best way to help them play their different and special role is to keep them in ordinary and normal relationships, to contradict them, correct them, not to say “yes” to them at all times, not to rob them of the proximity of fraternity.
Unlike all empires and today's capitalist enterprises (where the untouchability of leaders is a common rule, and where one arrives at self-destruction because of the excess of immunity), communities and ideal movements cannot afford this taboo. Because an "untouchable king" inevitably produces crisis and, if untreated, the death of the organization-community.
Because though at first this immunity-related disease acts on the relationship between members and their "head", it soon becomes the paradigm of every relationship. That partial and distant relationality, without intimacy and emotions, extends and reproduces itself on all hierarchical levels, and infects all private relationships. And so the exemptions and privileges extend to all the various "leaders", and the apathetic and bodiless relationality takes root throughout the community and becomes a general and widespread culture. One begins not by "touching" the founder, but by not touching any leaders, and ends up not touching anybody - not even one's own interiority, which becomes increasingly distant and poor. Because when you lose contact with the other's body - since all distances increase - you become less and less able to feel life, to take your own and others’ limits, or the imperfections and sins of history seriously, to cultivate emotions and desires, to develop that human pietas that can only grow in the impurity of concrete life. And you finds yourself in an atrophy of real human emotions and feelings, replaced by artificial emotions and feelings because they are all "bodiless". It is not at all rare to meet communities, especially in the generations after the foundation, which speak of an abstract solidarity and reciprocity, because the real ones have been "devoured" over time by the sacred culture of immunity and non-contact. The "heart of flesh" needs bodies that grow in the only good life possible: that of all women and men "under the sun". I have been to funerals where the priests and nuns present who were relatives of the deceased, were the least able to cry and feel a sincere pietas.
It is very difficult to defeat this community disease, not least because it is often mistaken for health. But it is not impossible. Sometimes you can find a way out of the myth and realise that you are ill. However, the cure is far from easy. We would need the courage to identify the disease of immunitas in the original nucleus of the first narrative capital, because the virus begins to work in the lives of the founders very soon, and therefore it is also found in the stories that constitute the first inheritance. But the "untouchability of the king" over time has become a tacit norm so deeply rooted that it also impedes the touchability of his narrative capital. And so we work on the peripheral aspects of ‘charisma' and tradition, without touching their heart; and the virus continues to act and to reproduce.
The cure would consist in the ability to re-found a new capital by drawing on the pre-immune phase of the experience, when everyone was still free and simple. And from there, to re-read all the other stories, which should not be discarded but only understood and loved in their embodied corporeality (taking the body seriously means understanding and loving the diseases of our history as well). And so the true miracle of reciprocity in time and between generations would be fulfilled: to restore to our founders the fraternity that we stole from them yesterday.
Download article in pdf
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Narrative Capitals/8 - Founding and continuing without haste, just like equilibrists
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire  on 31/12/2017
When a truly original genius makes its appearance in the world, people make haste to get rid of it. To achieve this goal they have two methods. The first is elimination. In the event of failure, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and hideous): exaltation, putting it on a pedestal and transforming it into a "god".
Lu Xun, An Introduction to a The sayings of Confucius 
At the origins of many communities and movements there is an experience of intense and deep closeness, among all of the members and - in the first place - with the founders. It is an extended kind of intimacy that exalts and develops the intimacy of each person. This particular "relational good" attracts, fills and fascinates no less than the ideal message received and announced. The contact of hearts and bodies, the sharing of the same table where meals prepared together are eaten, the real hugs to the "lepers" that immediately become true and different hugs exchanged with each other upon returning home. These are radically anti-immunitarian experiences, precisely because the many forms of mediation that we have invented in order not to touch the "wound of the other” are not there yet.
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Narrative Capitals/6 - What matters is to recognise deceitful prophets and storytellers
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/12/2017
 “Poverty is the first virtue to be discovered by all founders, and the first one to be forgotten by their successors." 
Carlo Maria Martini, Per amore, per voi, per sempre (“For love, for you, forever” - the tr.)
Ideology is a very common and serious illness in ideal-driven organizations (IDO), and it develops especially during the crisis of narrative capital, when amidst the shortage of true stories to tell the offer of new artificial stories that seem to respond to the hunger for sense and future that is hitting the community becomes very seductive. Ideology is the neurosis of the ideal - just as idolatry is the neurosis of faith. Among the many forms that ideologies take, a particularly frequent and dangerous form is the one suggested by Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel’s novel entitled El Conde Lucanor (Tales of Count Lucanor), which is the medieval source of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. But, unlike its various modern rewritings, in the original novel we find precious elements to add new words to our discourse on movements and communities that originate from ideals, charismas and motivations that are different and larger than the economic ones.
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The story begins with a bizarre deception suffered by a king. Three rogues come to court and promise him special clothes which can only be seen by legitimate children while remaining invisible to those who are illegitimate. The king takes the bait because he believes he has found a good mechanism to prevent the inheritance of someone who would prove to be a non-natural son. So the three cheater tailors get to work. The king, still doubtful, sends two servants to see the first new clothes, without revealing anything about their supposed magical properties to them. The servants see nothing in the spinning mills, but they don't have the courage to contradict the tailors, and they tell the king that they saw wonderful fabrics. Finally, when the king also goes to the tailors to see their work and can’t see anything, first he is upset but then thinks, “If I say I can't see the clothes, everyone will know that I'm not the king's son, and I will lose my kingdom.” So he believes the trick and he too begins to weave his praises of the new garments. Then he sends his governor, who, having heard about the features of those clothes from the king, even though he cannot see anything praises them with even more enthusiastic words, in order not to lose his position. After the governor, the other court officials also do the same. And when the feast day finally arrives and the king, completely naked, rides through the streets of the city on horseback, all the people praise the king's beautiful clothes. The spell is broken by a stableman of the king who says: “My Lord, for me it is the same thing to be the son of my father or another, and for this reason I say to you: either I am blind or you are naked.”
In this type of ideological production, first there are cheating false prophets that seduce the boss - the founder(s) or leader(s) of a community. It is not him to call them, but he receives them, and in doing so he commits the first and decisive mistake. From the cheater false prophets we should defend ourselves first of all by not receiving them at home and by making sure that they do not pass the controls that we normally do before receiving guests. During the storytelling crises, when numerous storytellers are asking to be received, it is essential to choose the "doorkeepers” carefully, that is to say those who welcome visitors, the staff of the executive or bureau secretariat. They play a very important role, because they must have the rare ability to spot false prophets immediately and block them. Because, in crises affecting the deep meaning of the community, those responsible are particularly manipulable by storyteller false prophets, by ideological snake charmers. Many crises are not overcome because the secretariat allows the wrong storytellers to pass through or because it blocks the good ones - or because it does both.
It was not by chance that at the head of the guest quarters of the abbeys and monasteries there were very wise and expert monks and friars: “Moreover, let also a God-fearing brother have assigned to him the apartment of the guests"(Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter LIII). In delicate moments of transition, wise communities must understand which the decisive offices and functions are. These almost never follow the formal order of the organization chart. In a good organization, the morphology of power does not coincide with the morphology of wisdom; and if wiser people are all placed in the senior positions, the others find themselves in the suburbs, which are the places of "weak powers" where the most serious diseases penetrate. Peripheral wisdom is always decisive, but especially when you are surrounded by false storytellers in search of "kings" to enchant. Also because the leaders of spiritual and religious IDO’s who are faced with very delicate crises of stories to tell, essential in order to be able to enchant the present and future members once again, are particularly exposed to the narrative manipulation of false prophets. And the more serious, widespread and profound narrative crisis that one goes through, the easier it is for founders and decision-makers to believe in the fantastic promises of the deceitful storytellers. “Kings" are always very sensitive to the inheritance of their kingdom. They have a vital need to understand who the legitimate children of their "charisma” are. And when, in times of crisis, they can no longer simply recognize them with their gaze, they are extremely vulnerable to those who promise them techniques that replace their eyes - communities are lost when false prophets prevent their founders/leaders from understanding who the authentic followers of their real history are.
Furthermore, it is important to note that in the story the deception could have been discovered immediately if one of the servants whom the (still doubtful) king sent for a first verification of the clothes had the freedom and courage to simply say what he saw, without fearing the costs and punishment for the freedom of his eyes. But it is precisely this kind of brave and free members who are scarce in the "secretariats" and around the founders and leaders. Almost always, in fact, they end up surrounded by "servants” who are very faithful but without the freedom and courage to simply say the things they see. They are even good persons, but they are moved and manipulated by their fear, even when it is disguised as respect or even veneration for their leaders. It is precisely in the first relationship between the servants sent out and the king where ideology is formed and begins to work. It is not enough to deceive the head. Ideology is a relationship, it is a "relational evil” that requires two or more people who begin to believe together in the same illusion and say that they believe in it. Ideology is a false individual belief that succeeds in becoming a collective belief, said loudly and in public - it is not enough to believe in ideologies, in order for them to get established they must also be proclaimed and repeated publicly and reciprocally.
Another, decisive role is played by governors and ministers. These are initially not so much driven by fear (perhaps partly), but by interests. They, too, do not tell the truth, although they know that they are saying a lie - however, quite simply, they have the incentive to lie. At this point the ideological apparatus is already working, and it spreads in the population simply by replicating the same fear and the same interests. In true stories, however, there is a fundamental difference comparing to the story narrated by the fairy tale. In real community affairs there are many people who are able to really see the clothes that do not exist. Ideology can become so powerful that we see a naked king as if he were dressed. And when the proportion of blind people in good faith exceeds that of those who lie (out of fear and interest), the ideological trap becomes (almost) perfect. We lose contact with reality because we can no longer distinguish what we really see from what we see thanks to the ideology. We live, even for a long time, in a false reality that some people - naively and sincerely - can really see and that others - out of interest - say they see knowing that they do not see it. The perfect producer-consumers of ideology are those who believe that the artificial world they see is really the true one - like Truman Show, it is the perfect reality show that every TV would like, where the protagonist lives his false life convinced that it is his real life.
In Juan Manuel's story, there is a servant to break the spell who, says the fairy tale, "had nothing to lose". Having nothing to lose, and perhaps inspired by a little bit of good will for the deceived king, that stableman found himself in the conditions of freedom to be able to simply tell the truth. In the fairy tale the king "cursed that servant" who revealed the truth, but the other fellow citizens of the kingdom one after the other came out of the spell and deception, triggered an opposite chain reaction, and the swindlers fled, betaking themselves to their heels. But why, unlike in fairy tales, does human history show us very few cases of ideal-driven communities that manage to get out of the ideological spell? Those who really saw wonderful clothes thanks to their ideology-influenced eyes don't want to go back to a reality which is true but much less colourful than what they "saw" for a long time and to which they were addicted - in fact, ideology is a form of doping which guarantees exceptional performance and removes the incentive to return to the fatigue and sweat of practice in the uphill roads and of uncertain results. Furthermore, over the years, many of those who initially saw the invisible because of interest have gradually transformed themselves into honest seers, and the share of people who see non-existing things in good faith can become an almost totality. Finally, the very few who have remained conscious of the ideological bluff are also those who are earning most from that collective comedy. Ideology is also very dangerous because once activated it feeds on itself, in different but convergent ways.
However, the happy ending of the fairy tale contains a message of non-vain hope. It is not impossible that - even outside the world of fairy tales - a single person saves everyone. One of the "remnant", a person who saved the freedom of their heart and eyes during the time of illusions. Like Noah. There are certain crucial moments when the ‘critical mass’ is ‘1’. A single person who "has nothing to lose", because, perhaps, they have already given everything, or because they have managed to shield their poverty. The many forms of poverty usually reduce our freedom, but sometimes poverty alone can generate a different freedom that is capable of liberating others. And if we then realise that in our desolate land of these poor people there is not even one left, we can always hope to become that one ourselves.
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Narrative Capitals/6 - What matters is to recognise deceitful prophets and storytellers
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/12/2017
 “Poverty is the first virtue to be discovered by all founders, and the first one to be forgotten by their successors." 
Carlo Maria Martini, Per amore, per voi, per sempre (“For love, for you, forever” - the tr.)
Ideology is a very common and serious illness in ideal-driven organizations (IDO), and it develops especially during the crisis of narrative capital, when amidst the shortage of true stories to tell the offer of new artificial stories that seem to respond to the hunger for sense and future that is hitting the community becomes very seductive. Ideology is the neurosis of the ideal - just as idolatry is the neurosis of faith. Among the many forms that ideologies take, a particularly frequent and dangerous form is the one suggested by Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel’s novel entitled El Conde Lucanor (Tales of Count Lucanor), which is the medieval source of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. But, unlike its various modern rewritings, in the original novel we find precious elements to add new words to our discourse on movements and communities that originate from ideals, charismas and motivations that are different and larger than the economic ones.
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Narrative Capitals/4 - Founding and Saving facts and acts aren’t always striking
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 03/12/2017
“Only infinite love can reduce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other.”
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death (English translation by: David Wills)
Narrative capitals are pluralistic. Not all the stories they are composed of have the same value. Only a few are able to carry the weight of the new construction. ‘Wheat’ and ‘weeds’ are found in all fields of the earth, including those special fields where our ideals grow. At the beginning we must grow all the plants in the field, because - as the great evangelical metaphor says - if the peasants intervened to eradicate the weeds they would also tear away the good and precious ears of wheat.
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Preserving all the ears of good wheat is a vital duty and a moral imperative of the founders and the first generation of a community and an ideal-driven organization (IDO), and this rightful concern to preserve the entirety of the experience and its narrative capital means that when the foundation phase ends, the harvest includes good wheat mixed with the weeds. So the heritage that the founders leave us is always a legacy of wheat and couch grass.
Some organizations become extinct because, already in the original phase, they do not know how to live with the presence of weeds and the inevitable impurity of incarnations. So they try to immediately separate the bad grasses from the good ones and don’t allow all the seeds to reach ripeness. Also because, unlike the real seeds and fields, the genuine components of our ideals can be distinguished from the bad ones only with the passing of time, and often what seemed to be discordant at the beginning, later flourished in wheat, and vice versa. Ideals grow well only by getting contaminated by all the nearby vegetation. They nourish off the same substances, live in osmosis with very different trees and, sometimes, also with poisonous fungi (that are only poisonous for those who eat them, but not for the other plants). Sometimes these flowers and plants are so delicate that they can grow only because they are protected by the shadow of less noble trees that, however, are more resistant to scorching heat. Only bonsai trees can live in the sterile places of our living rooms. They do not bear fruit, they have no roots, and they do not grow. Real stories are written with entire chapters of novels written by others and with passages of myths of surrounding ‘pagan cults’. No narrative capital is entirely new. Most of its ideas and stories are inheritance, even when the writer of a new story is not fully aware of them (because he or she fears that recognizing the gift of the past reduces novelty). Whoever begins to live and tell a community, corporate or political story inherits and generates wheat and weed.
But - and this is the most delicate and crucial process - those who come after the foundation phase tend almost inevitably to identify weeds only in the first inheritance, i. e. in the ideas and stories that the founders found as materials that existed prior to their new house, and to consider all good wheat that was produced by the founder. They thus attempt a first separation by looking for weeds only ‘outside’ and ‘earlier’, not ‘inside’ and’ ‘during’ the original words of the founder. In some cases we end up writing a new narrative capital by completely eliminating the old ‘contaminated’ stories inherited from the past and the environment, composing new stories using only what we think is new and original of the available materials. And so the weeds also present within the new ideas and stories of the foundation grow undisturbed because they are confused with wheat. Until one day the good fruits (new members and vocations) are finished, suffocated by weeds disguised as wheat.
Sometimes, at this stage of narrative famine, the post-foundation community has the gift and strength to realize that if it wants to hope to save itself, it must courageously begin the separation of wheat/weeds even inside the original narrative capital of the founder. Usually it is not without internal resistance that they begin to have a more mature and ‘distant’ look at the ideas, writings and stories of the foundation in search of really good wheat.
But even in these necessary operations it is very easy to find ourselves having exchanged the weeds with wheat. This is due to a very common mistake. It is thought that the true and good part of the narrative capital lies in its most spectacular and sensational elements, and so the more sober, simpler, poorer and more ordinary components are torn away. It’s a serious and widespread error, especially in the experiences born of spiritual and religious charismas. In these founding stories there are events, key episodes and narrations that were most impressive for the imagination of the founders themselves and later for the feelings of their first followers. They are often linked to facts that lie at the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, between the ordinary and the miraculous. In some cases they take the form of stories of visions or special revelations and in general they seem to be secret, often Gnostic and mysterious.
Each foundation, especially if it originates from a rich and deep charisma, is surrounded by this narrative component. Even the Church of the early days, for example, abounded in such stories, of which it also nourished and enriched herself. The time came, however, when the first Christians had to govern the proliferation of this spectacular and miraculous narrative component. Thus, among the many stories that circulated in those second and third phases, only four gospels and few other texts were chosen. Today we know that some (perhaps many) episodes and words contained in the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels were no less ‘true’ than the facts and words preserved in canonical texts. Many tales bloomed in a period farther from the first historical events, when some began to think that the first sober and essential kerygma wasn’t enough spectacular and secret to convert and conquer. But without that operation of separation and discernment the primitive Church would have been devoured by its own stories. The most sensational part that circulated about the life of Jesus and the apostles would have eaten up the overly sober stories of a young woman from Nazareth, the beatitudes for the poor and the afflicted, the story of the passion and therefore of the resurrection, which would have been equated to the many miracles of Jesus, to the ones that were similar to the deeds of the false prophets and magicians, or to the ‘resurrection’ of Lazarus. In the abundance of extraordinary stories, those first communities had to ‘sacrifice’ some real or probable facts in order to save the novelty of their own story capable of generating present and future. It is surely no coincidence that the resurrection of Jesus was accompanied by very few descriptions. The scene includes a few frightened women, a young man wearing white clothes, a gardener - incredulous people. The oldest manuscripts of the oldest gospel ended with these beautiful words, commenting on the empty tomb seen by the women: “and they said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8). In Paul’s letters there are no stories of the miracles of Jesus, only that of a ‘miracle’ of a crucified-and-risen person who is alive and is met by others along the way.
In moments of crisis of stories to tell, it is too easy to think that today’s new stories will have to start from the most striking stories of yesterday. We deceive ourselves if we believe that telling about past miracles is enough to generate new ‘miracles’ that would be needed today to continue the journey, and are missing. As if to revive the original reality it was enough to simply remember the special deeds of yesterday, and not relive them. We fall into a consumerist syndrome, which is as likely and tempting as rich of special events the foundation was, and we run the risk of blocking the next generation in the gluttonous consumption of sterile memories. Another resource curse: the more colourful the past is, the more faded the present risks of becoming, since the present is then lived by consuming the past, forgetting the future. Here the fatal error lies in the lack of understanding that the special gifts received in the founding phase were only ‘the wedding gift’ from which a beautiful (because ordinary and possible for all) new life was born. They are unique and unrepeatable experiences because they are linked to the revelation of the "prophetic" vocation of the founders. The fruitful inheritance that the founders leave us is not only dowry received as a gift, but the life born of those weddings. It’s a living child, not a shimmering, sterile diamond.
When this error occurs, the extraordinary part of the narrative capital, which is also part of the inheritance, becomes ‘bad money’, not because it is bad or false in itself, but because, in a new version of the old Gresham’s Law, it ‘drives out’ the ‘good money’ of the hard work of those who are seriously and humbly trying to write a new beautiful normality in life after the crisis of the first stories. This work of writing generative narrative capital is thwarted by the sellers of the memories, special effects and fireworks of the early days that are no longer there. It was not the big grey dog appearing to Don Bosco that generated the great Salesian educational movement; it was born above all from the very average ‘whistle’ that the young John Bosco provoked from the youngster named Bartolomeo. It was not the events recorded in “Fioretti” or the stigmata of Saint Francis that generated and regenerated the Franciscan movement, but the radical and tenacious fidelity of Francis to the ‘Madonna of Poverty’ of the Gospel. Isaiah did not save and nourish his people with the story of the vision of seraphim in the Temple on the day of his vocation, but with the humble prophecy of a child and a small faithful remnant, which fuelled non-vain hope during the exile, and which today continues to nourish our love-filled waiting that never ends.  
The sensational and extraordinary experiences of the foundation are beautiful seeds, but they don’t reproduce, and they only tend to throw the IDO back into the past, to make it addicted to narcotic substances. The new good narrative capital is not that of the memories of the miracles of yesterday, but the one generated by the new tales of today’s real and simple life.
In narrative capital crises there are always very few remaining resources. An IDO saves itself if it does not invest these in the consumption of its own extraordinary stories of the past, because it understands that the good wheat was to be found in the normal life of the first phase, in those facts that can still sprout many others because they are so extraordinary as to be ordinary, so finite to be really infinite. The story of a crucified man, a friend of sinners, fishermen, of those who forgive, of those who are forgiven, of communities that simply live in mutual love. Only on these normal and dusty roads of Damascus is it still possible to fall off the horse.
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Narrative Capitals/4 - Founding and Saving facts and acts aren’t always striking
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 03/12/2017
“Only infinite love can reduce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other.”
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death (English translation by: David Wills)
Narrative capitals are pluralistic. Not all the stories they are composed of have the same value. Only a few are able to carry the weight of the new construction. ‘Wheat’ and ‘weeds’ are found in all fields of the earth, including those special fields where our ideals grow. At the beginning we must grow all the plants in the field, because - as the great evangelical metaphor says - if the peasants intervened to eradicate the weeds they would also tear away the good and precious ears of wheat.
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Narrative Capitals/2 - Rising again should be learned and is only possible without a contract
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/11/2017
“The great writers project their shadow in two directions simultaneously. In one they offer their shadow to their predecessors, in the other to those who follow them".
Wislawa Szymborska, How to live more comfortably
The most tenacious and constant search that humans conduct on earth is the search for consolation. It is impossible to give it up, especially in difficult times of existence, when the pain of the present and the uncertainty of the future generate the invincible temptation to construct illusions in order not to die. Many people, even the great, interrupt their ethical and spiritual journey and regress when and because they give in to these terrible temptations.
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Organizations, especially ideal-driven organizations (IDO), are also deeply tempted by the cultivation of consolations. Often, faced with the urgency of having to change their course with courage and strength, they linger in the status quo full and satisfied and consoled by some fruit that continues to arrive. It is a serious and common mistake, which arises from confusing the "interests" of the narrative capital of yesterday with the wage of today's work - and so they live of the (decreasing) gains of the past believing, falsely, to live off of the new gains.
The destiny of every human community lies at the crossroads between the memory of the past, the management of the present and faith in the future. Roots, for example, are not the past of the plant. They are, at the same time, its memory, its life today and its blooming tomorrow. If, however, the roots are interpreted only as past, the typical illnesses of nostalgia inevitably arise, the first visible effect of which is the separation and distancing from the youth and from the reality of the present - young people flee away when they meet nostalgic communities with their eyes turned towards their origin. The only nostalgia generating a good present is that of the future. When the roots are read as the past, the narrative capital of the origin is transformed into a mummy, almost unavoidably. When the community (in rare cases) becomes aware of the ageing of the first stories and their imminent death, first the evolution of the mummified "corpse" is prepared, originated by the desire to save all that can be saved of the old body (the forms, the gaze, the features). What is left to the children is a corpse. The mummy does nothing but eternalise the death of the historical body. So it is the opposite of resurrection.
But resurrections are very rare events. Real death should be embraced; collective awareness should be matured as regards that first body which - notwithstanding its beauty and infinite charm - will never be there again. It should be accepted that the new life stories will be those of the future, which will also make people understand and "remember" the past. These authentic spiritual operations are proportionately as difficult as the first narrative capital was great and extraordinary, as the first historical body was "beautiful" – and so everybody wants to preserve it and not let it die.
But every "gospel" can only be written starting from a resurrection. Without the resurrection of Christ, his disciples would not have written anything, or would have written some Gnostic text that would have been added to the many generated in those early centuries of the late Roman Empire (and in all times of deep crisis, like ours). And so the narrative capital of parables, passion and death would not be remembered in spirit. And we would not have the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, we would not know of that crazy cry, nor of the other words resurrected on the first day after Saturday.
The first narrative capitals of the communities that are still alive and able to generate are the stories of the resurrection, because it is from these that the second stories of the more ancient historical facts are born. Stories that generate a lot of life for a long time are not those written by reporters while the events take place. Those chronicles die together with their characters. Unlike those accounts that are written by the “remnant” of the faithful who knew how to remain under the crosses, under the rubble of the temple, in the exiles, and who then recounted those facts of yesterday illuminated by life that had continued thanks to their tenacious fidelity. Even when the stories written after the events coincide with the stories written before, they are never the same, because the risen body is not the historical body. And instead, the most common error (because it is almost necessary) of the charismatic and ideal-driven communities is to think that narrative capital is an accomplished historical fact, the ipsissima verba of the founders. They don't really let them die, and therefore they don't allow them to be able, sometimes, to really rise again. Mummies cannot rise again. They are death and that’s all - like Manzoni's Donna Prassede, "when she says she was dead, everything is said".
Narrative capitals are capable of a future if they are interpreted as a seed, and therefore as something alive and that, because it’s a living thing, must die, and will only bring much fruit by dying, because that first seed will generate another hundred, a thousand. A seed lives, grows and dies precisely because it is alive – living things are alive because they are mortal. If instead the narrative capital of a charisma is read as a casket containing family jewellery, so shimmering and precious but dead, it is prevented from growing up, dying and bearing fruit. But how can we learn to rise again? No one can teach us. We can, however, at least avoid false resurrections. Just like in the Bible where the most bitter enemies of prophets are false prophets, in ideal-driven communities the mortal enemies of resurrections are false resurrections. The biblical prophets allowed for authentic resurrections of the people because they had, by their vocation, the infinite power to say that a first story was over. They made a second life possible after the deportation and destruction, because they did not deny the end - as the false prophets systematically did. Accepting real death did not prevent real resurrection. The inventors of fake resurrections (which are always forms of false prophecy) prevent the true resurrections because they continue to repeat that the "corpse" has not really died, that it is only an illusory death, sooner or later it will awaken. And so they propose and invent resuscitation techniques, build new defibrillators and convince the confused community to invest its last resources in attempting this "resurrection". Which does not happen: it will not happen because it cannot happen - but the ideological force of this false prophecy manages to justify even failure, to the very end.
Another false resurrection is to hide the corpse. The disciples in Jerusalem, Emmaus and Galilee made it possible for the "miracle" of the resurrection to be fulfilled also because they did not conceal the corpse, which is the most common way of false resurrection. But the corpses only tell stories of death, and living things need living things in order to continue to live. Sometimes, paradoxically, "the concealment of the body" is unknowingly favoured by the founders and by those who had been most enchanted by the first narrative capital. It happens when founders and the first generation try to reassure themselves and make sure that their charisma and community will have a future. They write very detailed and closed rules, so that the first narrative capital does not die. Instead of believing and trusting their "children" and "grandchildren" who will have their own charismatic chromosomes, an insurance contract is stipulated with the future, and they are told: "You should not change the past.” And so the healthy concern to save one's ideals produces the inevitable ageing of narrative capital, and the end of the experience. By preventing it from dying, they prevent it from rising again. In these cases, which are very deep traps, to save oneself there is a need for "children" and "grandchildren" - and sometimes "brothers and sisters" - capable of loving the fathers while also going against the letter of their fatherly recommendations, although knowing that they had been dictated by love and in good faith. Every "contract with the future" is a new concealment of the corpse, because such a pact is, in fact, the order to "start work" for the realization of one's own mummy.
Perhaps the early Church experienced something similar. We can imagine the historical phrases of Jesus that Peter and other disciples would have reminded Paul of to show him that the Gospel was only for the children of Israel, for the circumcised, not for the gentiles. But Paul did not fear conflicts with his brothers, he listened fully to the voice that spoke to him in his soul, he believed more in the present than in the past, and so he "saved" that first community, helping it to rise again, using his "charisma” to add new narrative capital to the first immense story, making it even more immense. Paul's stories and tales are not only, and not above all the stories and tales of Christ's historical life: they are the stories and words of Paul, which have also served the stories of Christ's life that came after him, and which perhaps would not have reached us, or would not have had the infinite strength that they had and still have without Paul's tenacious fidelity to his own different narrative capital. If the communities had only the "Peters", they would not save themselves from the obsolescence of their own narrative capital. The arrival of new "Pauls" is perhaps the only true salvation for the IDO’s. But when we are in labour we cannot know it, we can only hope and pray for it, and we can stay with the "lamps lit" to try to recognize when and if it arrives. And even if it does not arrive, we can live well and for a long time even if we wait for a true hope, renouncing to console ourselves with false hopes.
Real expectations are a precious nourishment of real life. There are IDO’s that end their race because they do not let Paul arrive. Others cannot recognise it because they have turned off their lamps. Others again because they call "Paul" the first false prophet passing by, a seller of cheap and easy salvations. Resurrections are not contracts. Nobody can assure us that they will come. On the contrary, what makes the miracle of their arrival is precisely the very real possibility that it will never happen. Non-false resurrections are always a gift, and therefore unforeseen. Only then do they surprise us and leave us breathless when they happen. When we recognize that wonderful voice in the person we thought was just a gardener.
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                    [helixultimate_page_title_alt] => Capitali narrativi
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    [text] => 
Narrative Capitals/2 - Rising again should be learned and is only possible without a contract
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/11/2017
“The great writers project their shadow in two directions simultaneously. In one they offer their shadow to their predecessors, in the other to those who follow them".
Wislawa Szymborska, How to live more comfortably
The most tenacious and constant search that humans conduct on earth is the search for consolation. It is impossible to give it up, especially in difficult times of existence, when the pain of the present and the uncertainty of the future generate the invincible temptation to construct illusions in order not to die. Many people, even the great, interrupt their ethical and spiritual journey and regress when and because they give in to these terrible temptations.
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