Sociologist Luca Ricolfi, ahead of the current public debate, critically analyzed woke culture in his essay "The Madly Correct: The Inclusion That Excludes and the Rise of the New Elite" (published in 2024 by La Nave di Teseo). Ricolfi denounces what he calls "a new pathology of contemporary society, the age of 'woke' and 'political correctness.'"
"On the plane," Ricolfi explains, "the captain would say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard.' Many airlines have changed this greeting. In Germany, for example, Lufthansa has banned the use of that greeting. Why? What's so offensive about it? 'Ladies and gentlemen' presupposes that there are males and females, but it doesn't include people who haven't yet decided whether they're female or male, or who are in transition. So the traditional greeting is dropped, and the pilot simply says, 'Good morning.'"
But who is responsible for all this? "If I have to identify someone responsible," adds the sociologist, "I think of social media. This degeneration of the 'woke' movement dates back 10-15 years and coincides with the rise of social media. What does it mean that social media matters? It grants individuals a disproportionate power of intimidation. In the age of social media, anyone can launch a smear campaign based on a true or false incident, and these campaigns can be very harsh. Joanne Rowling, for example, was subjected to them when she was slammed for a tweet about women. It must also be said that the insanely correct is a tool in the hands of educated and informed people who wield it without making mistakes. It becomes a tool of humiliation, used by an elite against the most defenseless classes."
Luca Ricolfi argues that the left bears great responsibility : " It's not that the Democratic Party secretary, at a certain point, decided to adopt the insanely correct. They found themselves in agreement. For a theoretical reason: the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy has prevailed on the left, replacing the equality-inequality dichotomy. Up to a certain point, the left reasoned in terms of equality-inequality (think of Norberto Bobbio's 1994 book). Then came my colleague Alessandro Pizzorno who convincingly declared that 'it's all wrong, we must talk about inclusion-exclusion.' This completely changed the left's way of thinking, which posed the problem of inclusion and not that of reducing inequalities. So the insanely correct was a hit. I wrote my book primarily with the left in mind. I'm very sorry that one of the two political parties, in this case the left, starts out with a handicap compared to the other. It's as if they were running a race with bags of lead on their shoulders." Running an electoral campaign based on woke culture – concludes Ricolfi – means losing many votes».