Calamandrei uses the metaphor of the boat, the ship, and it is a metaphor that I have always found very apt. It is expressed in the story of two immigrants, two peasants, who are crossing the ocean on a lurching ship. One of the peasants is asleep in the hold, the other is on deck and sees that there is a huge storm brewing, with towering waves that are causing the ship to pitch. Frightened, he asks a seaman: ‘Are we in danger?’ The seaman replies: ‘If these swells continue, the ship will sink in half an hour.’ So the peasant runs down to the hold to wake his companion and cries: ‘Beppe, Beppe, if these swells continue, the ship will sink in half an hour.’ And his friend says: ‘What do I care, it’s not mine!’ That’s what indifference is, that’s what non-participation means. But not participating, believing that what’s happening around you doesn’t concern you, entails handing over the country to powers that know how to organize and manage consensus, and who will take away everything you have. To think of the state as something apart from us means losing the prospect of law. The state is not apart from us, the state is us.

Seemingly the consequences are not all negative. For example, you can use politics to get what the law does not grant you. If you don’t have a job, you strive to get one by voting for a certain politician; if you don’t have a good bed in the hospital, you vote for the councilman who will do you a favour and obtain one for you. This is what politics is likely to become when there is no participation by everyone: no respect for fundamental rights anymore, simply a matter of trading favours. What is hard to understand is that all this seems reasonable. To all appearances it appears so, but in reality it isn’t. Because the politician who promises you favours, while giving you one thing, takes away all the rest. He gives you a hospital bed for your grandmother, maybe he gives you a permit to open a tobacco shop, he gives you a poorly paid job off the books, but he’s taking away everything else. He takes away the possibility of breathing clean air, he takes away the work you deserve if you are capable. He takes away the schools to which you should have a right.