Mafia and Amoral familism (1)

Who have not seen “The Godfather" maybe cannot understand why many times i have to explain “what” mafia is and “what it is not” to foreign. Mafia cannot be perceived as “ cool” mystery and spy story, with great characters, “non-moral” sense of family and ethic... it is something different.

I found, in these days, a new article on Roberto Saviano (author of Gomorra, a book of a criminal organization similar to mafia called camorra).
He is leaving escorted by policemen and bodyguard because he told the truth about a criminal organization that lead business in our democratic and developed country and now...he leaves in danger of death.
As him, many others, that are fighting or were fighting mafia, camorra and others ('Ndrangheta,...), are in danger of death or are death.
The mafia is something that push you in front of the wall, make you turn down the head...you follow or you die.
It is, with camorra and others, one of the first economic power in Italy, leading the business of drugs, “slaves”, “bitches” and guns from Africa, south America east Europe; recycling of dangerous “rubbish” for big enterprises and other countries (ex. Start to research about Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin , and you will discover how also the “business of rubbish” can kill many persons), and recycling of money in clean activities.
Mafia and camorra are able to make disappear children, because related to persons that are enemies or just decided to collaborate with the justice, are able to organize a car-bomb to destroy their enemy, and not avoid to commit massacre to kill just one person while he/she is in the middle of 10 or 100 others. Mafia and camorra have the same behaviour of a “terrorist group”, just that, we can say, they want to achieve an “economic” issue and not a politic one.

So mafia is an organization that play a “one shot game”, not leaving space to the communication and the development on the community in which it acts.
The structure of mafia (camorra, etc.) is similar to one of a state, that's why many historic and specialist say that it is a form of “state in the state”, it means that in Italy we have a Democratic government elected by citizens and ...the mafia's government, not elected and “hidden”.

Of course you cannot find that in the newspapers, or in the TV's, and the governmental will says “no!!it is not true!, but when a part of the country is “governed” from some power that is different from the “official” one what can we say? That there is a second power, locally established, that control the “land” and manage it. Oh my god, so there is a mafia's government in Sicily? No, not officially, but if to get a job, to build an house, to obtain an authorization, to keep on with your business you have to pay a “tax" to someone that is part of a criminal organization...you are not free and you are not obeying to the “official laws” but to a local power that is able to decide and make you following its decisions, if not you are sanctioned.
So it is a power in a power! A sort of small internal state.

It is difficult to explain how this organization are formed, from where they born and why.

It is a social behaviour linked with a big historical mistake, the one's coming from the unity of Italy, and maybe also before, when the savoy's kingdom unified the country without being able to change the situation of poverty and non development in the south, and also being able to have a real control on it.
The south was “ungoverned” as before and the situation let space to local “representatives” to take power and establish a sort of order, starting to collaborate with the National Government and doing, in the same time, it own business.

A basic idea of what could lead to mafia and camorra existence is a theory of a sociologist, Edward C. Banfield, that in his book Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) explain the idea of “amoral familism” (Familismo amorale) , analysing a rural community in the south of Italy.
The theory explain how in some parts of the world(as in the south of Italy) the community are not linked by political and national issues but by “blood stream”. In this theory the family acts looking at her own interest, before that at the communitarian interest-benefit. The sense of family is “non-moral” (without moral) because the family acts not related to the public aims and the community, as the opposite of the idea of family as base of the “national family”. So the categories of “good” and “bad” have sense inside the family, between their members, but not in the relationship family-outside world. In that way the community is unable to develop itself because it is blocked by its internal nucleus, the family. It is linked to the natural state of Hobbes, the one in which persons are as “homo homini lupus”. Instead of an individual man the Banfield's theory is linked to nuclear family acting for their immediate and material interest, and , in this way, acting also against the others.
In this form it appears difficult to build a society interested in the general development and benefits, and it seems easier to develop a form of criminal organization that it is based on the idea of family, not any more “nuclear” (mum,dad,sons) but bigger and more articulated. The mafia is a “family”, organized and ruled by internal laws of respects and hierarchy, that take care of its member when they are “respectful” of it and support them also in the moment of difficulties (ex. The family of a person affiliate to mafia that goes to jail, is supported by the organization with a monthly salary).


(./. to be continued)