Become who you are: this is the promise inscribed on the gates of modernity. But what happens when no one is able to become themselves anymore?

The world we were prepared for no longer exists: now is the time of disappointment, of broken promises. Of the struggling class as the destiny of the West, and of the revolution that shakes it. This book is the guide for navigating our difficult times. And coming out better? Let’s not exaggerate. One tenth of the world’s population consumes nine tenths of the planet’s resources: the problem is that we are that tenth. So why does the conquest of happiness seem ever more distant? The idea of a social elevator, which was supposed to lift each individual above everyone else, has revealed itself for what it is: a logical fallacy and an ideological deception. In a society where everything is permitted but nothing is possible, we must learn to live with the certainty that no one will ever truly become themselves.

A decade after shaking his generation with a cult book, Raffaele Alberto Ventura returns to write about the “struggling class”. He does so by tracing its origins —in literature, in philosophy, in cinema, from Hamlet to Fantozzi— and by outlining a horizon that is anything but bright. Because in the meantime the situation has not improved at all, quite the contrary, and we are all (or almost all) members of the struggling class. Human history alternates between phases of illusion and phases of disillusion, which inevitably erupt into revolutions from which civilizations emerge radically transformed, sometimes destroyed. With aspirations shelved, good intentions of resilience failed, and anxiety too rigid to be soothed by a yoga session, ever larger segments of the Western middle class are being seduced by the demon of revolt. Can you imagine the struggling starting a revolution? You should, because it has already begun.

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