I have never been a great history enthusiast; in high school, I remember not wanting to study history and philosophy, I preferred scientific subjects, but with age, I began to appreciate and value the knowledge of our origins.

My history teacher, Professor Viscogliosi, was desperate, to the point that one day she said to me, "Simone, other teachers tell me you are brilliant. Why don't you study history?" The motivation she gave me to encourage me was always the same: "By knowing the past history, one can build a better future"...

If I look at the world today, I feel like saying: "Here, there are two things... Either this statement is complete nonsense (in the style of Fantozzi), or many other people along with me have not studied it!"

Would this be the better world?

I am not referring to technological innovations; in this area, we have made giant strides (not us, obviously, the world), I am referring to the values that have been lost, the decline of empathy in social relationships, the growing individualism, the replacement of face-to-face communication with chats and social networks, the replacement of high-level stereotypes with widespread ignorance. If we have to follow that saying, it seems that history has taught very little!

Some will speak of improvements advocating their cause with the conquests of rights; okay, but they are ephemeral, children of a false superficial respectability, because the real history is not the one perceived on the surface, the one evident to all made of "politically correct" phrases, they are just chatter; the true history is the one unspoken, the one that requires concentration and attention towards the world of economics, politics, technology, and finance to be seen. The true history is the one deduced by analyzing the world over the centuries and not from a myopic view of just the present. If you do not have a clear idea of what was there before, the values of before, you cannot make a comparison that allows you to say, it is better today! No, it is not better today; we are only living an illusion... We do not live better; we live in a more comfortable way thanks to technological discoveries but not better.

Morality and Values

I remember my maternal grandmother when she told me that her father (my great-grandfather) sometimes did not bring home food just to avoid adhering to fascism. I remember my paternal grandmother when she told me that my great-grandfather was decorated because he single-handedly repelled the front.
Once there was poverty, but people lived by ideals. The idea was something powerful; now the idea is driven by money. Easy money. If I had to make a comparison, placing the ideal as if it were a boat, before it was steered by a motor that could be activated to go against the wind and the current; now this motor is no longer there, and the boat moves by drift and drift, carried by the wind and the current. It is money that directs the bow and charts the course. No one wants to achieve success through sacrifice anymore. We are in the age of simplification. Everyone believes that everything is easy and that you can have everything without commitment and without effort.

Open social media and you see only butts and breasts, breasts and butts, half-naked girls expressing themselves in ways that even professional prostitutes you happen to see when driving on Via Salaria do not use. They talk about sexual relationships so explicitly and without filters as if they were talking about the weather tomorrow. It is a world where superficiality reigns supreme, where human essence has been replaced by an obsessive search for likes and followers, because stereotypes have changed.

The New Stereotypes

As a child, I dreamed of being a scientist, an engineer, an astronaut; today, 99% of children dream of becoming a footballer or an influencer. And the girls? Showgirls, models, those who undress on TikTok and Instagram. Everyone repudiates studying... And some loudly proclaim: "Those who graduate do so because they are ugly; at least with a degree, they can find a little job for 1200 euros a month; if you are beautiful, you do not need to study to make money; you find a man with money and get supported."

And how do they get supported! Paid vacations, watches worth 30,000 euros, designer clothes, and handbags that cost more than a car. More foolish than them are the rich kids who play along!

But what point have we reached, my friends? To a point where skills and talent must bow before breasts and enhanced lips?

Who do we leave this country in the hands of? And above all, once passed into the hands of these foolish minds, how long can a country last?

Then we wonder why minds escape

And what do we wonder about? What is strange about this behavior? What should the minds do? Those few thinking heads... Should they stay in a country that does not value them? Should they remain to watch a sequence of useless and superficial ignoramuses show muscles, butts, and breasts, earning tens of thousands of euros a month while they, who have invested years and years of their lives cultivating an education that serves to move forward, make discoveries, advance humanity, fight desperately for a meager salary and to be recognized?

Let's move everything forward by 15/20 years. In 20 years, what will these amoebas showing breasts and butts show? Withered breasts and butts? What will they do afterward? What will have been the meaning of their lives? But above all, what improvement will they have contributed to their country? What mark will they have left or tried to leave of their existence?

Nations are Businesses

A nation is made up of many offices, and each of these offices has a purpose, its own structure, and people who work to make them function. In Italy, nothing works anymore, but taxes are absolutely insane. Entrepreneurs are desperate because they are crushed by taxes, and in return, what do they receive? They receive nothing! Neither they nor their children. Universities are destroyed, at the end of their ropes, doctors work grueling shifts to earn a pittance, and people complain because if they need to book an appointment, if they are lucky, they get it after 6 months. The roads, for which we pay car taxes, the proceeds of which should be allocated to their maintenance, are full of potholes. You step out of the house to go to a client, and you find yourself doing giant slalom like Alberto Tomba did in the '90s.

Gasoline prices are rising; about 44% of the cost per liter is made up of taxes, another legalized state scam. Do you remember the tax on the Vajont dam? It was one of the smallest; it impacted about 0.3% of the total cost of gasoline. Today, we no longer talk about the tax for the Vajont dam, but it has not been removed; it has been incorporated into the general structure of taxes, so if I finish paying and you do not remove it, as I see it, we are still paying it... Does it occur to you that when you finish paying a car loan, the bank can say: "Look, we will continue to withdraw the 300 euros a month for the car payment even if you have finished, but we will include it in the general structure of the payments to be made"? What kind of reasoning is that? Did I help the Vajont? Good! Did I clean up what needed to be cleaned? Very well! End of that tax. It must be removed... Instead, no, they remain because who goes to check? Just change the name; just erase the name and put it in the general structure of taxes; here they change names for everything, and people do not realize it because if they start thinking about it, then they put a couple of Champions League matches on, and in less than two days, they forget.

Well, the tax for the Vajont dam amounted to about 10 lire per liter in 1963 (the year of the disaster).

Shall we do some calculations and see how many we have rebuilt since 1963?

Italy: A Country of Dams

As already mentioned, the tax for the Vajont is normally indicated as the increase of 10 lire per liter introduced in 1963, after the disaster of October 9, 1963; the provisions for the affected areas were approved by the law of November 4, 1963, no. 1457.
In historical reconstructions regarding taxes, that item appears as "Vajont disaster 1963 - 10 lire/liter," which is about 0.00516 euros/liter (and I repeat, it is one of the lowest; there is much worse).

Now the key point is this... That item has not really been eliminated but incorporated into the general structure of taxes. So, even if today there is no longer a "separate piggy bank for the Vajont," from the taxpayer's point of view, that portion has remained in the overall tax burden, so the state pockets it.

To estimate "how many dams we would have rebuilt," it is advisable to use a very down-to-earth comparison because I could not find much data online for Vajont, but we have cases with similar tax amounts:

Making a very conservative estimate, therefore:

Therefore, the cumulative revenue compatible with a "Vajont tax that has never really been removed" is roughly around: about 11/12 billion euros nominally overall.

For the Vajont, historical timelines report a projected cost of 15 billion lire. A historical monetary revaluation coefficient for 1963 equal to 17.3102 brings that order of magnitude to about 134 million euros in 2021; brought back to 2025/2026 values, we are roughly around 140-155 million euros.

If we divide 11 billion euros by 155 million, wanting to be optimistic, we get 71 Vajont dams; if instead, we want to be pessimistic, we divide 12 billion euros by 140 million, obtaining as many as 86 dams.

Therefore, let’s say that with a tax equivalent to that of the Vajont, maintained within the system until today, the order of magnitude is about 78 Vajont dams.

The important part, however, is another: this number does not mean that the state has really "collected money to rebuild 80 Vajont," it means that a micro-historical quota born for a specific event, if left to sediment for decades within a general tax on huge volumes of fuel, generates gigantic figures. And this is precisely why the public discourse on taxes is so frustrating, not for the single half cent per liter of gasoline but for its infinite persistence even after we have finished paying these rates for cleanup and reconstruction.

Back to Us

Returning to the discussion related to skills... The Vajont dam is just one of the taxes that we are continuing to pay unjustly:
- 1935 - Ethiopian War
- 1956 - Suez Crisis
- 1966 - Flood of Florence
- 1968 - Belice Earthquake
- 1976 - Friuli Earthquake
- 1980 - Irpinia Earthquake
- 1983 - Mission in Lebanon (the most expensive with 205 lire/liter)
- 1996 - Mission in Bosnia
- 2004 - Renewal of the public transport workers' contract
- 2009 - L'Aquila Earthquake
- 2011 - Libyan Crisis
- 2012 - Emilia Earthquake

For a total of €0.728 per liter.

Congratulations!! But let’s continue to watch the Champions League!!!!

And this is just one of the authorized thefts. We could talk about highways, contracts and subcontracts, government cars, public funds, reimbursements to politicians, etc. etc. It wouldn’t be enough to fill a book to discuss all this general corruption.

And do you know whose fault all this is? Of these generations of fools who have the right to vote and of a political class that is not even remotely comparable to the political culture of the first republic.

Where Do the Estimates Go?

In my opinion, it will only get worse. The more we go forward, the more we go backward! We are even witnessing a reverse Flynn effect (intelligence quotient that is decreasing). We are creating a society of mediocrity and ignorance.

This is why minds escape. Because here they see no future. This country is destined for irreversible decline. And this decline is reflected in all sectors.
Do we want to talk about technology? We are stuck with cathode ray tube TVs.
Is there perhaps an Italian company that produces OLED screens?

Cloud?
Do we know any Italian company that is a leader in the cloud computing sector?
Google -> American
Microsoft -> American
Amazon -> American
And so on, the list is endless.

We are stuck on everything, only cooking, but this is possible only because we are the first country in the world for biodiversity, and not thanks to the capabilities of people, but just by a mere geographical coincidence that has given us a unique climate in the world; and tourism, also due to the great architects and engineers of the past, to the great artists of the time who made real history leaving us as heritage an immense artistic and cultural treasure. Let’s face it, we are still floating thanks to our ancestors who made history and to Mother Nature who wanted to give us this biological variety. We certainly do not float thanks to our abilities. I keep asking myself how we could go from Dante Alighieri to today’s fools in just a few centuries... How did we go from Verdi and Puccini to trap music in just 100 years!

We have managed to destroy everything that made us a great nation of minds and values into a container of clueless fools capable only of showing intimate parts on social networks.

It is truly sad to see how our culture, our artistic and intellectual heritage, has disappeared under a flood of ignorance, superficiality, and banality.

I hope the day will return when the scientist, the musician, the painter, the poet will have millions of followers and the bimbo showing her butt and breasts will have a moment of self-reflection. At the current state, a world that needs to be completely turned upside down!