This is the third and final part of the interview with Roberto Siconolfi, sociologist, essayist, director of the YouTube channel "La Nuova Occidentale", social and political analyst, and scholar of media, technological philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The aim is to see if, behind what appears to be lucid madness, lies a well-structured plan.

You will find the previous articles here.

D'Angelo: Do ​​you really believe that the state should be, let's say, transparent in the sense of not existing except for the bare minimum? Don't you believe that there are state activities that should be its exclusive prerogative, such as transportation, healthcare, and education? These are sectors that currently, and have been for some years now, aren't in the best of health; on the contrary, perhaps precisely because of a slow and devastating handover by the state to private interests. Just as I wouldn't want to be in the United States, where if you don't have private insurance, they won't even let you into the hospital.

Siconolfi: On this issue, as on the tariff issue, there is a dialectic within the Trumpian populist movement itself. There's the side of JD Vance, for example, of a new-style Catholic-conservative nature, which favours state intervention in the social sphere, which wants to give the state more power to redress social inequalities. Then there's the other side, embodied by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who instead belong to that American anarcho-capitalist—paleo-libertarian, one might say—culture, in which the state must be reduced to the bare minimum because for them, it's essential to leave complete freedom to the creative and productive impulse of the individual and to the power of communities.

Trumpism isn't a single, shared vision. This dualism has also been observed on tariffs: Musk was the first to rebuke Trump on the issue of tariffs, which are contrary to the free economy, and many of the disagreements he has had with the president also stem from this cultural difference.

Coming to Italy, or rather, to the European Union, the pressure from the oligarchies and the technical-scientific committees to regulate and discipline our lives is so strong that there is no other option than to try to reduce this gigantic apparatus. And of course, I absolutely agree that minimum services guaranteed by the state should remain.

For example, highways connect the entire country, and it's a system that, despite affecting the autonomy of local communities, must necessarily involve the state. The same thing, as you said, applies to healthcare, schools, and law enforcement. All of this should be left in the hands of the state and made more efficient, because I don't want to pay for a service, but the train stops somewhere along the way for half an hour or more. But let's also start addressing the idea of ​​"state".

The modern state is not an absolute in history; it was born with the French Revolution, with Jacobinism, and later became that gigantic apparatus in which, with good political leadership, things go well, as in the First Republic. With poor political leadership, things go terribly for the freedoms of individuals and local communities.

I believe the time has come to reflect on the meaning of the state as it is understood today, because personally, in the battle against neoliberalism, I see much of that statist and centralising mentality, which is the main cause of the situation we are experiencing. We also need to understand what neoliberalism is.

If by neoliberalism you mean a hyper-regulated market, where the European Union is essentially ruled by the ECB, the European Commission, and various lobbies that have as much power as a single party, prohibiting the circulation of ideas and free speech, then I am anti-neoliberal. And if by anti-neoliberalism you mean placing everything in the hands of the state to create mega-bureaucratic-economic juggernauts, in the name of supposed social policies, where everything is slowed down by excessive disciplinary activity, then I'm not even anti-neoliberal.

I wouldn't think in these terms: I'm trying to bring the discussion into a slightly broader, more humanistic context perhaps; that is, to see if this way of organising society is the only possible and the best one, which I don't believe it is.

This is a criticism of economism, of basing one's entire life on the economic question.

Personally, I believe that the system we live in today—Western, consumerist, capitalist, economistic, call it what you will—is not only not the best, but I think it will eventually come to an end, as they say, because its very foundations demonstrate that it cannot last much longer. The extractive model is showing its limits.

Consider that the Western model proposed by the European Union and the World Economic Forum is no longer even consumerist; it's a model that's moving toward pauperism. The ideal citizen of today's world is no longer one who works, produces, and consumes, but one who stays at home on welfare, eating junk food from morning till night, binge-watching TV series, and taking drugs and psychotropic medications. Therefore, even the model of productive capitalism, founded on creative impulses, on venture capitalists, and on the pioneers of economics like Ford, is no longer the model pushed by the elites. Those elites are pushing a very "collectivist" model, one where production is essentially a sin of the ego, a sin against nature, and a sin that breeds inequality.

The European Union has launched a final series of plans and measures to combat inequality. This speaks volumes, because their model is that of a bureaucratic society ruled by a technical-scientific commission, essentially parasites, and where everything else is done by a mass of zombies who lose themselves in a "playful" life, which isn't really all that playful.

And who will run the economy if we're all at home watching TV?

The economy is driven forward by large corporations that engage in a highly ideological discourse, denying the very foundations of profit, the driving force of surplus value; the entire logic of Karl Marx's analysis of capital is undermined. Because when Netflix, despite suffering significant losses from its "woke" TV series where, for example, Snow White is played by a woman of colour, continues to churn out these products, or when the conversion to green technology leads to a complete impoverishment of the German auto industry, yet it continues along this path, it becomes clear that the power of the idea is much stronger than the economic structure and that we are heading towards pauperism and, perhaps, to doing business with Chinese industries.

The economy always finds ways to reshape itself. But the model they're proposing is no longer Trump, Berlusconi, Musk, Reagan, or Thatcher, but the zombie Draghi wanted, the one who says, "Stay home and I'll do everything; I'll give you a little subsidy, but do what I say."

This concludes the interview with Roberto Siconolfi.

What I try to do through the interviews I offer you is to show points of view that don't necessarily coincide with my own, but it is precisely through the eyes of those who don't think exactly like me that I try to interpret reality and what is happening around me, focusing on what I think can help me form as balanced an opinion as possible on the facts and ideas that inevitably impact all of our lives.

I hope they help you too.