The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Danilo Dolci has sparked a
flurry of celebrations and initiatives in memory of the sociologist from
Trieste - transplanted to Partinico - who first surprised those who have
always fought to make him known. Improvised speakers, ex cathedra
professors, enemies in life, friends post mortem, tightrope walkers of
words and thoughts, mass media experts and sacristans, have taken turns
in recent months in an attempt to recover Dolci's thought and work from
the political and cultural establishment that he had strongly contested.
Institutes and universities, slaves to the statist narrative, and
supported by the multinationals of war and capital, try to make Dolci's
rebellion against mass media conformism, the disinfestation from the
virus of domination, active nonviolence, the commitment to a social
anti-mafia, reciprocal maieutics - his main creature -, the innovative
theories on education, communication, poetry, social change, organic
development, urban planning, harmless and compatible with the system.
It is therefore urgent to point out the true contribution that Dolci has
given to contemporary thought and culture.
UNDER THE SIGN OF FREEDOM
Danilo Dolci was an eminently libertarian thinker, although he did not
always show that he was aware of it.
Very little of what he wrote or experimented can be said to be the fruit
of a solitary journey. It is rather the result of an incessant and
passionate research on how to radically change the face and life of a
territory, conducted by him for forty-five years, together with a host
of friends and collaborators, who took turns over time, many of whom
were of great value. Dolci's main quality consisted in extracting,
absorbing, amalgamating, socializing, exposing in his books - often in a
poetic and fascinating way - and then translating into practice the best
that they were expressing and designing in Partinico and Western Sicily.
His debts are infinite: with Lamberto Borghi, Aldo Capitini, Grazia
Fresco, Carlo Doglio, Piero Pinna, Pierre Martin, Erich Fromm, Johan
Galtung, Noam Chomski and countless others; but also with "precursors"
of the caliber of John Dewey, Célestin Freinet, Maria Montessori, Lewis
Mumford ...
The theme of freedom inspires and nourishes all of Dolci's writings,
particularly those of the last period (1986-1997), when reciprocal
maieutics, born as a method for the collective research and resolution
of social problems, transformed into an educational and knowledge
technique for adults and minors, also became a means for political and
social self-training, strictly correlated with the goal: liberation from
the virus of domination.
In those writings, all the connotations of the concept of freedom are
present, from the classical ones: negative (liberation from all coercion
and interference, such as from political and economic despotism) and
positive (complete development of the personality and natural potential
of the individual); to the contemporary ones concerning the
"recognition" of other people's identities and differences, on
experience and joint responsibility.
These freedoms are real objectives that the community or "educating"
community, as Antonino Mangano defined it, is called to pursue by
eliminating the distance that exists today between education and politics.
Reciprocal maieutics, in which each member of the community becomes the
other's maieuta, makes use of "communication" between individuals, which
is made up of questions and answers, listening and recognition,
comparison and dialogue, construction of what Lamberto Borghi, one of
Dolci's teachers, called "fraternity of free and doubting men". Also in
this case, its strongly libertarian value and identification with the
goal are unquestionable: liberation from the structures of domination,
such as those intended for the transmission of unidirectional,
homologating, "passivizing" knowledge or for the survival of the
Moloch-State, which controls and takes over our lives.
Several writers, inside or outside the Dolci maieutic movement, have
emphasized the defense of democracy, which thanks to maieutics would
reject any authoritarian regurgitation, on the one hand, and any form of
disobedience to the laws, on the other. It seems to me instead that the
latest Dolci - but on various occasions also the previous one - goes
well beyond the democracy of the vote, of the majority and of
representation. Dolci's maieutics is inclusive, democracy is exclusive.
Democrats claim to impose their will on minorities, on those who from
time to time do not think the same way as them, passing it off as a
general, legitimate, sovereign will; to indoctrinate, instill truth,
beliefs, dogmas professed only by a part of the population; to repress
and swallow up dissent, the deviant, the different; to finally force
obedience with oppression and violence.
Dolci's maieutics instead aims to build an open, participatory,
egalitarian, creative society, which rejects leaders and leaders, and
every form of violence against man, which connects and does not
separate, lets knowledge interact, seeks and finds the connections and
levers for a social revolt that is increasingly urgent and necessary today.
Natale Musarra
"This land is like one of its beautiful little girls... who, abandoned
to themselves, grow up wild, uncultured, ferocious and who, instead, if
cared for, would change the face of this country".
Danilo Dolci, Spreco, Turin, Einaudi, 1960.
MAIEUTICA AND NONVIOLENCE TO INVENT THE FUTURE
Danilo Dolci as an apostle of nonviolence, the Gandhi of Sicily, of his
use of methods of social and political struggle such as fasting, passive
resistance, the reverse strike, and as the first to denounce a
negotiation of the State with the Mafia, coining the expression
"clientelistic-mafia system", has been discussed at length. The
violence-nonviolence binomial substantiates Dolci's entire vision of
life, the deepest motivations for his actions, his deepest questioning,
his most radical life choices. Since he was a boy, during the
Resistance, he chose to oppose violence («I was horrified by the thought
of being forced to kill: especially on the side of the Nazis»), but also
to question himself on what violence is, to understand the reasons for
the birth of violent behavior and how to remedy it. He abandoned his
studies at the Polytechnic of Milan, his family and his girlfriend
because, he says: «Every day I realized more and more that becoming an
architect would mean for me to insert myself into the gears of a machine
for which I would produce houses for those who had less need of them».
And his convictions were refined in the fire of the meeting with Aldo
Capitini and Don Zeno Saltini in Nomadelfia.
In one of the conversations that took place in Spine Sante, a
working-class neighborhood among the most disadvantaged and poor of
Partinico, in the mid-1950s, the participants tried to answer the
question of how many forms of violence can exist. Vincenzina, a widow
with five children, with whom Danilo will have five more children,
expresses her point of view as follows: "I think that the rich don't
care about the unemployed, and let them die of hunger... The
greatest[violence]is war, and the smallest, but they are all great,
letting a child die of cold; that maybe there are wooden children
dressed in the shop windows, then outside there are children who are
naked and barefoot, and this doesn't seem Christian to me..."
For Danilo, the problem of Sicily is a problem for all of us, it is the
problem of how to deal with structural violence, with a State that turns
a blind eye to poverty, exploitation and abuse and that is often the
architect of it and opens them only in the face of the violence of the
so-called "bandits". In Fare presto (e bene) perché si muore, a
sociological investigation and denunciation pamphlet published by
Francesco De Silva in Turin in 1954, Dolci seems to have clear ideas:
«Sometimes the first commitment is to lift a bucket, clean a toilet,
immediately look for bread, work for those who suffer the deprivation of
it ... The State as an entity in itself, authoritarian, outside of the
conscience, of the life of men, is an evil ... And it is also dishonest
to use the State's money, which is also mine and of those who think like
me to sow death ... Condemning men to remain ignorant is already a crime
...».
In the warning to the subsequent investigation, in 1955, Banditi a
Partinico, with the preface by Norberto Bobbio, the denunciation is
clearly brought into focus and Dolci takes a clear, firm, lucid and
critical position against the guilty and inefficient State: «Among us
there is a world of those condemned to death by us. Sometimes, even out
of justified intolerance, he tries to rebel: with machine guns and
prison he responds. Let's stop siding with the strongest, leaving them
the possibility of suffocating others, just by system, in broad daylight".
When you live in a state of poverty that persists also due to the
carelessness of those who should take care of it, it is necessary for
those directly involved to come together to organize initiatives and
nonviolent pressure against abandonment and exploitation, not going into
hiding and violently threatening those who live better, those who have
more than us. Hence the importance that everyone learns first to
observe, then to reflect and finally to sow questions. As happened with
the construction of the dam: "Most said it was too good to be true then
slowly, slowly the small group became larger. They talked about a basin
because everyone knew what a basin was and few knew what a dam was until
the group began to apply pressure... The construction was important not
only because it brought water to the area but it gave people the
experience that it was possible to change and I'll tell you a short
story. One day, after a few years since the dam was built, an old farmer
comes up to me and grabs me by the shirt and says a sentence that I
understand as words but I don't understand as meaning: ci su l'anitri,
and seeing that I didn't understand, he repeats and finally I understand
that this man gives me a huge speech in one breath. He wanted to tell me
in this land for centuries and for centuries the ducks passed over this
sky without stopping, now even the ducks have realized that everything
is changing, the ducks, nature is experiencing that it is possible to
change the face of their land and I thought that if an old farmer has
understood this, this is very important for all people... because in the
end the dam is important, and the water is important, but in every part
of the world it is important above all to know how, with what lever, you
can succeed in changing".
The change and development that Dolci talks about are, first of all,
cultural, of method, of vision, experiencing an advantageous
alternative, valorizing one's own knowledge, learning to communicate,
learning to interpret the other.
In nature there are two models of relationship between living things,
the parasitic one of the tick or the continuously inoculating and
violent one of the virus, which reproduces identically to itself inside
an organism, exploiting it and leading it to death and the symbiotic
one, of reciprocal creative adaptation of the flower and the bee: the
flower attracts the bee with its color and scent, the bee feeds,
pollinates and produces honey. Every man can choose whether to adhere to
a biophilic and creatural conception of existence, in which each one is
able to express his own intimate potential in osmotic structures, or
necrophilic and parasitic, of annihilation and domination over others.
All of Danilo's work bears witness to a tenacious commitment to creating
libertarian fronts and nonviolent maieutic groups against neoliberal
imperialism, homogenizing consumerist globalization, against everything
that is system, rigid structure, crust and armor, inhuman, alienating
and castrating, against a short-sighted logic of destruction of the
habitability conditions of the planet, for the purpose of immediate profit.
Although the tick is always lurking everywhere and always disanimating,
paralyzing, blocking every attempt to imagine-observe with new eyes,
humanity flourishes by looking, listening, touching, meditating,
choosing, inventing, learning to deviate from a system that commits
crimes, recovering energies that every day we risk wasting or leaving
unused. We also need to know how to invent a new model of civitas.
The same maieutic method, as in the popular self-analysis in Spine Sante
where each became the other's midwife, was used to build the
experimental center of Mirto:
«I started looking for a place and I thought I had found it and to be
more sure I invited a friend called Zu Sariddu, now unfortunately he is
dead, an 80 year old person full of imagination, of light, of almost
illiterate intelligence, I took him to see this area, I asked if it was
suitable and he to my great sorrow says no, this is not suitable, but
why is it not suitable? It is cheap, it is full of adventures, it is
beautiful. He says no, it is not good because from here you cannot see
the sea so I say to him: and could you look for some other place? He
says: give me a few weeks' time and after a few weeks he brought me
here. Then I understood what he wanted because from here not only could
the children also have the perspective of the sea but they could also
see that this land that for centuries had remained scorched, yellow,
burnt during the summer was green due to irrigation even during the
summer thanks precisely to the commitment of their brothers, to the
commitment of their fathers even if they had gone to jail and once again
I had to think listening to this Zu Sariddu: if this is not culture I
don't know what culture is. Of course this was also important for the
people, to be able to feel that their local culture was developing, and
the school was then designed by some architects who made some drafts,
then discussed with the population, and little by little we tried to
have this environment keeping in mind that we are in Sicily and that,
except for two, three colder months like now, usually the children
explore almost all day outside in the countryside, in the mountains, do
their research, take notes and then discuss».
To improve the educational experimentation at the Mirto Educational
Center, Dolci and the work of organic planning from the bottom up for
the creation of a different model of development at the Study and
Initiatives Center for Full Employment in Partinico and in the various
centers founded in western Sicily, also following the terrible
earthquake that hit Belice in 1968, Dolci called on experts,
pedagogists, educators, sociologists, architects, economists, from all
over the world to collaborate. Once the construction of the Jato dam
against the mafia exploitation of the area began, the need arose to
understand how to enhance the local culture by opening it to the best of
the world. From the 1970s until his death, he continued to organize
maieutic workshops, pursuing a coherent path that has roots in his
experience of struggle and action and in the practices of personal and
popular self-analysis and social liberation undertaken already in 1952.
Today, in a world increasingly threatened by environmental and climate
disasters, dominated by the market economy, big finance, and arms
lobbies, the practice of maieutics, demonstrating that everyone's
thoughts count, and that we evolve only if we take care of the quality
of relationships between living creatures in a living cosmos, becomes
necessary for everyone.
Until the end of his life, Danilo Dolci prepared to organize initiatives
to publicly denounce the illegal presence of nuclear submarines in the
NATO base of La Maddalena, collecting documents and testimonies. And he
continued to draft public appeals. In the Draft Manifesto. From
transmitting to communicating, published six times until 1997, the
appeal is addressed to the educator who is in everyone in the world. The
motif of illness and treatment returns. The inability to communicate is
a structural illness of society, to be cured: «We must not fear the
diagnosis. An illness intoxicates us and prevents us: the life of the
world is affected by the virus of domination, it dangerously suffers
from wrong relationships ... From the family to school, to associative
and productive life, up to state and international scaffolding, in the
most varied contexts, immense synergies can grow from work and community
interaction founded, instead of on fear and distrust, on the desire for
multiple discovery and joyful self-realization that, responsibly
imagining, coordinates the future. Sowing questions in everyone, matures
and germinates answers: voice and new power».
Sebastiano Pennisi
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
flurry of celebrations and initiatives in memory of the sociologist from
Trieste - transplanted to Partinico - who first surprised those who have
always fought to make him known. Improvised speakers, ex cathedra
professors, enemies in life, friends post mortem, tightrope walkers of
words and thoughts, mass media experts and sacristans, have taken turns
in recent months in an attempt to recover Dolci's thought and work from
the political and cultural establishment that he had strongly contested.
Institutes and universities, slaves to the statist narrative, and
supported by the multinationals of war and capital, try to make Dolci's
rebellion against mass media conformism, the disinfestation from the
virus of domination, active nonviolence, the commitment to a social
anti-mafia, reciprocal maieutics - his main creature -, the innovative
theories on education, communication, poetry, social change, organic
development, urban planning, harmless and compatible with the system.
It is therefore urgent to point out the true contribution that Dolci has
given to contemporary thought and culture.
UNDER THE SIGN OF FREEDOM
Danilo Dolci was an eminently libertarian thinker, although he did not
always show that he was aware of it.
Very little of what he wrote or experimented can be said to be the fruit
of a solitary journey. It is rather the result of an incessant and
passionate research on how to radically change the face and life of a
territory, conducted by him for forty-five years, together with a host
of friends and collaborators, who took turns over time, many of whom
were of great value. Dolci's main quality consisted in extracting,
absorbing, amalgamating, socializing, exposing in his books - often in a
poetic and fascinating way - and then translating into practice the best
that they were expressing and designing in Partinico and Western Sicily.
His debts are infinite: with Lamberto Borghi, Aldo Capitini, Grazia
Fresco, Carlo Doglio, Piero Pinna, Pierre Martin, Erich Fromm, Johan
Galtung, Noam Chomski and countless others; but also with "precursors"
of the caliber of John Dewey, Célestin Freinet, Maria Montessori, Lewis
Mumford ...
The theme of freedom inspires and nourishes all of Dolci's writings,
particularly those of the last period (1986-1997), when reciprocal
maieutics, born as a method for the collective research and resolution
of social problems, transformed into an educational and knowledge
technique for adults and minors, also became a means for political and
social self-training, strictly correlated with the goal: liberation from
the virus of domination.
In those writings, all the connotations of the concept of freedom are
present, from the classical ones: negative (liberation from all coercion
and interference, such as from political and economic despotism) and
positive (complete development of the personality and natural potential
of the individual); to the contemporary ones concerning the
"recognition" of other people's identities and differences, on
experience and joint responsibility.
These freedoms are real objectives that the community or "educating"
community, as Antonino Mangano defined it, is called to pursue by
eliminating the distance that exists today between education and politics.
Reciprocal maieutics, in which each member of the community becomes the
other's maieuta, makes use of "communication" between individuals, which
is made up of questions and answers, listening and recognition,
comparison and dialogue, construction of what Lamberto Borghi, one of
Dolci's teachers, called "fraternity of free and doubting men". Also in
this case, its strongly libertarian value and identification with the
goal are unquestionable: liberation from the structures of domination,
such as those intended for the transmission of unidirectional,
homologating, "passivizing" knowledge or for the survival of the
Moloch-State, which controls and takes over our lives.
Several writers, inside or outside the Dolci maieutic movement, have
emphasized the defense of democracy, which thanks to maieutics would
reject any authoritarian regurgitation, on the one hand, and any form of
disobedience to the laws, on the other. It seems to me instead that the
latest Dolci - but on various occasions also the previous one - goes
well beyond the democracy of the vote, of the majority and of
representation. Dolci's maieutics is inclusive, democracy is exclusive.
Democrats claim to impose their will on minorities, on those who from
time to time do not think the same way as them, passing it off as a
general, legitimate, sovereign will; to indoctrinate, instill truth,
beliefs, dogmas professed only by a part of the population; to repress
and swallow up dissent, the deviant, the different; to finally force
obedience with oppression and violence.
Dolci's maieutics instead aims to build an open, participatory,
egalitarian, creative society, which rejects leaders and leaders, and
every form of violence against man, which connects and does not
separate, lets knowledge interact, seeks and finds the connections and
levers for a social revolt that is increasingly urgent and necessary today.
Natale Musarra
"This land is like one of its beautiful little girls... who, abandoned
to themselves, grow up wild, uncultured, ferocious and who, instead, if
cared for, would change the face of this country".
Danilo Dolci, Spreco, Turin, Einaudi, 1960.
MAIEUTICA AND NONVIOLENCE TO INVENT THE FUTURE
Danilo Dolci as an apostle of nonviolence, the Gandhi of Sicily, of his
use of methods of social and political struggle such as fasting, passive
resistance, the reverse strike, and as the first to denounce a
negotiation of the State with the Mafia, coining the expression
"clientelistic-mafia system", has been discussed at length. The
violence-nonviolence binomial substantiates Dolci's entire vision of
life, the deepest motivations for his actions, his deepest questioning,
his most radical life choices. Since he was a boy, during the
Resistance, he chose to oppose violence («I was horrified by the thought
of being forced to kill: especially on the side of the Nazis»), but also
to question himself on what violence is, to understand the reasons for
the birth of violent behavior and how to remedy it. He abandoned his
studies at the Polytechnic of Milan, his family and his girlfriend
because, he says: «Every day I realized more and more that becoming an
architect would mean for me to insert myself into the gears of a machine
for which I would produce houses for those who had less need of them».
And his convictions were refined in the fire of the meeting with Aldo
Capitini and Don Zeno Saltini in Nomadelfia.
In one of the conversations that took place in Spine Sante, a
working-class neighborhood among the most disadvantaged and poor of
Partinico, in the mid-1950s, the participants tried to answer the
question of how many forms of violence can exist. Vincenzina, a widow
with five children, with whom Danilo will have five more children,
expresses her point of view as follows: "I think that the rich don't
care about the unemployed, and let them die of hunger... The
greatest[violence]is war, and the smallest, but they are all great,
letting a child die of cold; that maybe there are wooden children
dressed in the shop windows, then outside there are children who are
naked and barefoot, and this doesn't seem Christian to me..."
For Danilo, the problem of Sicily is a problem for all of us, it is the
problem of how to deal with structural violence, with a State that turns
a blind eye to poverty, exploitation and abuse and that is often the
architect of it and opens them only in the face of the violence of the
so-called "bandits". In Fare presto (e bene) perché si muore, a
sociological investigation and denunciation pamphlet published by
Francesco De Silva in Turin in 1954, Dolci seems to have clear ideas:
«Sometimes the first commitment is to lift a bucket, clean a toilet,
immediately look for bread, work for those who suffer the deprivation of
it ... The State as an entity in itself, authoritarian, outside of the
conscience, of the life of men, is an evil ... And it is also dishonest
to use the State's money, which is also mine and of those who think like
me to sow death ... Condemning men to remain ignorant is already a crime
...».
In the warning to the subsequent investigation, in 1955, Banditi a
Partinico, with the preface by Norberto Bobbio, the denunciation is
clearly brought into focus and Dolci takes a clear, firm, lucid and
critical position against the guilty and inefficient State: «Among us
there is a world of those condemned to death by us. Sometimes, even out
of justified intolerance, he tries to rebel: with machine guns and
prison he responds. Let's stop siding with the strongest, leaving them
the possibility of suffocating others, just by system, in broad daylight".
When you live in a state of poverty that persists also due to the
carelessness of those who should take care of it, it is necessary for
those directly involved to come together to organize initiatives and
nonviolent pressure against abandonment and exploitation, not going into
hiding and violently threatening those who live better, those who have
more than us. Hence the importance that everyone learns first to
observe, then to reflect and finally to sow questions. As happened with
the construction of the dam: "Most said it was too good to be true then
slowly, slowly the small group became larger. They talked about a basin
because everyone knew what a basin was and few knew what a dam was until
the group began to apply pressure... The construction was important not
only because it brought water to the area but it gave people the
experience that it was possible to change and I'll tell you a short
story. One day, after a few years since the dam was built, an old farmer
comes up to me and grabs me by the shirt and says a sentence that I
understand as words but I don't understand as meaning: ci su l'anitri,
and seeing that I didn't understand, he repeats and finally I understand
that this man gives me a huge speech in one breath. He wanted to tell me
in this land for centuries and for centuries the ducks passed over this
sky without stopping, now even the ducks have realized that everything
is changing, the ducks, nature is experiencing that it is possible to
change the face of their land and I thought that if an old farmer has
understood this, this is very important for all people... because in the
end the dam is important, and the water is important, but in every part
of the world it is important above all to know how, with what lever, you
can succeed in changing".
The change and development that Dolci talks about are, first of all,
cultural, of method, of vision, experiencing an advantageous
alternative, valorizing one's own knowledge, learning to communicate,
learning to interpret the other.
In nature there are two models of relationship between living things,
the parasitic one of the tick or the continuously inoculating and
violent one of the virus, which reproduces identically to itself inside
an organism, exploiting it and leading it to death and the symbiotic
one, of reciprocal creative adaptation of the flower and the bee: the
flower attracts the bee with its color and scent, the bee feeds,
pollinates and produces honey. Every man can choose whether to adhere to
a biophilic and creatural conception of existence, in which each one is
able to express his own intimate potential in osmotic structures, or
necrophilic and parasitic, of annihilation and domination over others.
All of Danilo's work bears witness to a tenacious commitment to creating
libertarian fronts and nonviolent maieutic groups against neoliberal
imperialism, homogenizing consumerist globalization, against everything
that is system, rigid structure, crust and armor, inhuman, alienating
and castrating, against a short-sighted logic of destruction of the
habitability conditions of the planet, for the purpose of immediate profit.
Although the tick is always lurking everywhere and always disanimating,
paralyzing, blocking every attempt to imagine-observe with new eyes,
humanity flourishes by looking, listening, touching, meditating,
choosing, inventing, learning to deviate from a system that commits
crimes, recovering energies that every day we risk wasting or leaving
unused. We also need to know how to invent a new model of civitas.
The same maieutic method, as in the popular self-analysis in Spine Sante
where each became the other's midwife, was used to build the
experimental center of Mirto:
«I started looking for a place and I thought I had found it and to be
more sure I invited a friend called Zu Sariddu, now unfortunately he is
dead, an 80 year old person full of imagination, of light, of almost
illiterate intelligence, I took him to see this area, I asked if it was
suitable and he to my great sorrow says no, this is not suitable, but
why is it not suitable? It is cheap, it is full of adventures, it is
beautiful. He says no, it is not good because from here you cannot see
the sea so I say to him: and could you look for some other place? He
says: give me a few weeks' time and after a few weeks he brought me
here. Then I understood what he wanted because from here not only could
the children also have the perspective of the sea but they could also
see that this land that for centuries had remained scorched, yellow,
burnt during the summer was green due to irrigation even during the
summer thanks precisely to the commitment of their brothers, to the
commitment of their fathers even if they had gone to jail and once again
I had to think listening to this Zu Sariddu: if this is not culture I
don't know what culture is. Of course this was also important for the
people, to be able to feel that their local culture was developing, and
the school was then designed by some architects who made some drafts,
then discussed with the population, and little by little we tried to
have this environment keeping in mind that we are in Sicily and that,
except for two, three colder months like now, usually the children
explore almost all day outside in the countryside, in the mountains, do
their research, take notes and then discuss».
To improve the educational experimentation at the Mirto Educational
Center, Dolci and the work of organic planning from the bottom up for
the creation of a different model of development at the Study and
Initiatives Center for Full Employment in Partinico and in the various
centers founded in western Sicily, also following the terrible
earthquake that hit Belice in 1968, Dolci called on experts,
pedagogists, educators, sociologists, architects, economists, from all
over the world to collaborate. Once the construction of the Jato dam
against the mafia exploitation of the area began, the need arose to
understand how to enhance the local culture by opening it to the best of
the world. From the 1970s until his death, he continued to organize
maieutic workshops, pursuing a coherent path that has roots in his
experience of struggle and action and in the practices of personal and
popular self-analysis and social liberation undertaken already in 1952.
Today, in a world increasingly threatened by environmental and climate
disasters, dominated by the market economy, big finance, and arms
lobbies, the practice of maieutics, demonstrating that everyone's
thoughts count, and that we evolve only if we take care of the quality
of relationships between living creatures in a living cosmos, becomes
necessary for everyone.
Until the end of his life, Danilo Dolci prepared to organize initiatives
to publicly denounce the illegal presence of nuclear submarines in the
NATO base of La Maddalena, collecting documents and testimonies. And he
continued to draft public appeals. In the Draft Manifesto. From
transmitting to communicating, published six times until 1997, the
appeal is addressed to the educator who is in everyone in the world. The
motif of illness and treatment returns. The inability to communicate is
a structural illness of society, to be cured: «We must not fear the
diagnosis. An illness intoxicates us and prevents us: the life of the
world is affected by the virus of domination, it dangerously suffers
from wrong relationships ... From the family to school, to associative
and productive life, up to state and international scaffolding, in the
most varied contexts, immense synergies can grow from work and community
interaction founded, instead of on fear and distrust, on the desire for
multiple discovery and joyful self-realization that, responsibly
imagining, coordinates the future. Sowing questions in everyone, matures
and germinates answers: voice and new power».
Sebastiano Pennisi
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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