Milli mála - 26.04.2009, Síða 259

This process of democratization of culture becomes a synonym
for vertical social mobility. Theoretically everyone is given the
‘opportunity’ to move upward quickly to higher levels of society.
This principle of democratization started as a positive progressive
principle, but under the control of the new elites its foundations are
set on an imbalance and a consequent dissociation in society and
individuals: this imbalance derives from the contradiction, inher-
ent in western modern societies, “between egalitarian ideology and
the hierarchic division of labor required by modern industry”.18
According to Lasch, the democratization of culture began after
the Great Depression in the United States, much earlier than in
Europe, and potentially extended to everybody the chance to attend
the same schools and therefore to have the same opportunities of
success. Due to the practical impossibility of achieving each indi-
vidual’s goal, this idea led the majority of the people who ‘could
not make it’ not to blame the system, but to give “moral judge-
ment on their own lack of ambition or intelligence”.19 Thus the
most relevant and historically new consequence of democratization
is a sense of guilt and self-denigration, due to the failure in social
fulfilment. Within a society which claims that there are the same
opportunities of success for everybody and which spreads through
the media a vision of the world essentially based on success and
individual distinction, just being ordinary is perceived as a social
failure. As a consequence in political praxis, in many western
European countries, where people with their protests had achieved
increased salaries, reduced working hours, better conditions and
rights recognition for employees, today a countertrend is clearly in
action: the uncertainty of jobs, decreasing salaries, diminishing
workers’ rights, and worsening work conditions. Moreover, the ten-
dency of the working classes is not to join in common protest but
to yield to individualism, which represents a definite renounce-
ment in modifying the established order. This is not the only form
of dissociation which weakens the non-elitist part of western soci-
ety. Pasolini also sets out the concept of “progress” and “develop-
STEFANO ROSATTI
259
18 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, p. 52.
19 Ibid, p. 53.
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