We asked Cesare Moreno, president ofNon-profit Road Masters Associationto answer some questions.
How can we address the problems of drugs, polyconsumption of substances, new addictions, for example, technological ones among young and very young people today?
Extreme youth behaviors, including those mentioned, constitute compulsive responses to problems that require complex responses that should mark the transition to maturity. From my point of view there is the general problem of dependence which is essentially a "crisis of presence" or even a form of "widespread anomie". Two sides of the same coin that refer to feeling permanently out of place, from having a compulsive need for strong sensations to realizing that you are there. Among these responses I also include dependence on ideologies and charismatic leaders, obsessive conformism and even syndromes of social withdrawal that take this feeling of being out of place to the extreme. All these situations refer to a single problem: the absence of community, that is, the absence of significant ties, of relationships in which the young person feels they have a role, feels that their existence has a meaning, can feel their existence because there is someone who shares a dream, a desire with her.
What strategy should services have today to address the problem of youth hardship?
Any service, starting from the school one, should start again not from youthful discomfort, but from the "distress of civilization" from the contemporary forms that existential discomfort takes on, the way of the human animal of being in an organized society. The process of hominization The process of civilisation, even in the most rarefied forms of culture, is still based on processes that concern the body and its emotional expressions. The discomfort of civilization is first of all the difficulty in placing the bodily self in a social process which in its dominant expressions denies all phenomena linked to the body and treats them all as objects of consumption and a supposedly rational hyper-control. Starting from here means working with young people starting from sharing a profound discomfort, starting from the fact that adults and operators demonstrate with their existence and resistance that they know how to be themselves despite everything, despite "all evidence to the contrary" aimed at devaluation of the human. Any service to the person should start from sharing, from trying to build community, from taking care of a common good together which in this case is the psychological well-being of young people and the operators responsible for interacting with them.
To deal with addictions, how can networking be structured that is organic and truly integrated between services and other resources present in the area: schools, voluntary associations, parishes, social cooperatives, employers?
For true networking it is necessary to found an alliance upstream of the services. We need to recognize ourselves together in a territorial community even before in a professional community. The networks have so far been understood as a federation of independent republics, with all the limitations and failures of the case. Instead, we must start from sharing a common good which in this case is the network of community relations. The people are concrete and non-ideological entities, when mutual care exists, when specialists communicate intimately with non-specialist interlocutors. The essence of a true community is the permanent and equal dialogue between people who perform a specialized function and ordinary citizens who are not recipients but interlocutors of those who perform a service. Each service has its own specific logic linked to the techniques it must use in relation to its mission, but all services must operate as part of a community and as founders of that community. As long as the services operate as outposts of the State in territories untouched by grace, the networks do not work and if they work they do so in defense of themselves - of a professional identity as an end in itself - and not in support of the community of life.
Where to start from to start recovery paths for young people and very young people who experience forms of addiction and social hardship?
It is necessary that in every neighborhood, in every territorial unit for which a space for community relations can be envisaged, there is a center for the promotion of sociality that is not only youthful, but concerns all citizens who feel the desire to establish community relations , a place that promotes initiatives and does not limit itself to aggregation, a place where an authentic meeting between generations can take place. In this community "cultivation soup", specialized services can operate that help and support young people in finding the path to significance.
