THE WORLD OF "LA MISERIA"
227
and quickly enough, to be able to buy a ticket to America (or at least
to
northern Italy).
Of course, the most spectacular form of flight is emigration abroad.
There were years
in
which the exodus from Lucania exceeded the birth–
rate and
in
which two-thirds of the male population of some towns lived
overseas. America, for a time, became identified with the ideal side
of life and still today it
is
easy to find people who speak of
it
simply
as
"that country." Less spectacular perhaps, but of greater significance
for the whole fate of Italy,
is
a form of internal emigration: the flight
into
government employment. Both in the national bureaucracy and
in
the police southerners constitute a solid majority. Instead of the
normal growth of an individual, instead of the shifting continuity be–
tween actuality and possibility, we have a one-time jump out of
«la
miseria"
into the immediate vicinity of the State, the ever-realized ideal,
from which flows the magma of "influence" giving the lowliest bureau–
crat his privileged position and separating him, as if by an insurmount–
able gulf, from the rest of the citizens. Another cause of the flight into
the bureaucracy is the fact that the southern peasant economy, which
exists virtually without the use of money, has no need of a middle
class.
Italian society finds it generally difficult to absorb academically
trained personnel into creative jobs; and this difficulty is increased by
the desire of the middle class to preserve its "standing" and therefore
to
send its children to the university, regardless of their inclination and
ability, and by the intellectualistic type of education the universities
offer.
The peasants or artisans who succeed
in
fleeing
«la miseria"
and
enter government service, carry their mentality of mutual distrust and
the petty curiosity of small communities
into
the police forces of the
State. As for the bureaucracy, instead of being an instrument for the
well-defined purposes of a government, it represents an end in itself
and, therefore, is a dangerous parasite upon the body politic. And
the police, far from being the objective custodians of the public order,
represent an outmoded apparatus of petty spying with no other appar–
ent purpose than that of satisfying their instincts of diffidence and cur–
iosity.
One may therefore say that the national bureaucracy represents
the revenge of an often forgotten and otherwise exploited south upon
the whole of Italian society. Themselves unable to "realize," the mem–
bers
of the bureaucracy consider as dangerous to their own position
those modern spirits willing and able to "achieve."
This failure of self-fulfillment is perhaps best illustrated by the
peasant's religious life. The fact is that in these regions the Church
