But are we still masters of our destiny?

«We thought we were masters of our destiny, while others, in places that we didn't even imagine and that didn't necessarily coincide with governments and parliaments, decided for us»: with these words the journalist Marcello Foa takes us directly to the heart of his latest essay "The (in)visible system” (Guerini and Associates, 2022, Euro 19.00, pp. 256).

In the book, Foa, among other things for some years president of Rai, takes up and updates a theme dear to him: how and why it is possible to direct and, if necessary, manipulate information, often without the knowledge of the journalists themselves. For years, in fact, in his writings he has been trying to reveal the logic, techniques, tricks used by the great persuaders in the service of the institutions, so as to show us the role and mysteries of the world of information and debunk some clichés about the Citizen Kane.

The starting point of the reflection proposed by Foa is the sensation, shared somewhat by all, of how it is increasingly difficult to recognize the world in which we live. Above all we continue to carry out, almost mechanically, gestures that seem to have less and less concrete value. For example, we continue to elect parliaments and governments but the decisions that matter are taken elsewhere. We continue to believe in the neutrality and freedom of the Net and in the power of information when the excess of news we can draw on gives us back the sensation of no longer being able to understand, understand, interpret. Supporters of the Internet argue, for example, that the very freedom to access information granted by the web is a deterrent to the spread of false news. For them it is difficult for false information to escape thousands of users who have the ability to control it. Instead, as we all know to some extent, the web is the homeland of fake news, taken for granted precisely because it is relaunched by the web.

In this communicative marasma, according to Foa, we witness astonished the destruction of the middle class, while the frequent crises of our age - from Covid-19 to the energy one, passing through disruptive phenomena such as the cancel culture - shake our certainties, accentuating our bewilderment . We witness all this with a sense of helplessness that we are unable to explain or outline the contours.

Marcello Foa tries to be our compass, describing a system that is visible and at the same time deliberately invisible, and which can only be understood by stepping outside the classic interpretative schemes. Analyzes the role of the elites, demonstrates how it is possible to shape the masses, change values, direct politics, the economy and the media also making use of the techniques of psychological influence, including those developed by the CIA and the Kgb. Everything happens in front of us but we don't have eyes to see it: this is how societies are governed in the modern era.