Your grandparents put Oscar Wilde in jail. Will you do the same with me?

di Filippo Addarii

I have never really appreciated Oscar Wilde. I had to read him, as expected, with a liberal Parisian intellect when I was in my early 20s.

I’ve never understood his value. I found him a mundane author whilst admiring writers like Pasolini: an outsider, full of drama, practically suicidal.

I didn’t understand the subtle war waged by Oscar Wilde to society: being an insider unmasking the truth nobody dares to tell… like his love.

Neither marginalised nor pure, but he had infiltrated society to contaminate it with new ideas from within.
I hadn’t understood his value until I found myself accused of the worst crime from just the words that I used – not my actions.

Oscar Wilde ended up in forced labour and died exiled in Paris. Should I share the same fate because I dared to joke on what today society judges unspeakable? The unique beauty of our western society is individual freedom to say as mush as it doesn’t harm anybody else. Should we not talk about suicide bombers, rape, racist hatred or paedophilia because we don’t understand them and just want to get rid of them. Perhaps reinstating death penalty?

I refuse this. Society must address such problems and find solutions. This is not a witch-hunt but it is, first of all, about understanding the reasons and motives, working out solutions and punish antisocial behaviour if necessary. But censorship is uncivilized!

I refuse to keep quiet and spare such topics with my humour. I’m a free man in a free world looking for the truth.
Are only certain truth forbidden in the sector?

A banker friend told me that “in baking it’s simple: there are rules. You respect them and outside you do whatever you want. While in the sector you’re all fundamentalists!” He might be partially right but I work in civil society because freedom, justice, innovation motivate our actions not bigotry.Therefore the quote of the week is Nietzsche, the controversial German philosopher. Actually it’s the subtitle of The Antichrist: To Become What You Are.
I know I shouldn’t refer to that book. My persecutors will accuse me to be a Satanist. But I don’t care. The witch hunters are always ignorant. The book is a denouncement of hypocrisy.

And  I quote another one: Omnia munda mundis (everything is pure for pure souls) wrote Saint Paul. The witch hunters see the evil everywhere…except within themselves.

I’ve learnt how to be myself and I’m not ashamed. Actually, I’m the opposite.

You can describe me as a catalyser of change in a nutshell.

Let’s use another literary metaphor: Pinocchio. In that story I would be both Lucignolo and Fatina. The first one is the young fellow who leads Pinocchio into troubles: gambling, smoking, drinking etc.

Fatina, on the contrary, is the fairy who helps Pinocchio to get out of trouble and finally become a boy i.e. a grown man.

People approach me because they look for change. I can be pivotal if you know what you want to make with your life or you can get lost loosing all your boundaries if you just bored with your life.

It’s a question of individual responsibility. There is no freedom without responsibility, is there?

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