Gabriele Vitella - Apollineo e Dionisiaco

Raffaele Sollecito, who knows a thing or two about media judgment, has uttered two sentences that deserve to be carved into the textbooks of contemporary ethics — not for their rhetorical elegance, but for their raw truth.

He says: “We live in a world where jokes about minorities are censored, yet one can easily ruin the life of an innocent person and then pretend nothing happened.”
And he adds, as if to deliver the final blow: “Nowadays, political correctness defends everyone and everything — except those who have done nothing wrong.”

Words that sound almost like blasphemy in a society that has turned “formal respect” into its new secular religion. It no longer matters what you do, or whether you are guilty or innocent: what matters is saying the right words, taking the right side, using the right language.

It is the moral grammar of our time, where virtue is measured not by the substance of one’s actions, but by the correctness of one’s language.
Sin is no longer injustice, but the wrong word.
Sollecito touches a raw nerve, because his words speak not only of himself but of an entire season of Western civilization in which hypocrisy has disguised itself as sensitivity.
We live in an age where a man’s reputation can be destroyed by a newspaper headline, a post, or a rumor — and once the damage is done, we wash our hands like Pilate.
The machinery of suspicion has no reverse gear.

On political correctness, Sollecito grasps a subtle truth: what was born to defend human fragility sometimes risks turning into an armor that isolates rather than protects.

A religion of harmless words has been built, and its rituals are celebrated every day on Twitter and TikTok.
But while we rush to replace uncomfortable words with euphemisms, we fail to notice that outside the dictionary, people’s lives are still being ruined — silently, with a bureaucratic coldness that no “trigger warning” will ever redeem.

Montanelli, if he were here, might have smiled bitterly.
He would have said that the ethics of form is a gentle kind of censorship, disguised as good manners.
And he would have added that freedom does not consist in avoiding offense, but in not being afraid to tell the truth.

Sollecito, with his calm and slightly weary voice, reminds us that innocence is no longer enough.
One must also please, conform, and choose the right words so as not to disturb the sensitivity of the popular tribunal that lives on social media.
But justice — true justice, the kind that should dwell in courtrooms and in consciences — cannot be founded on consensus, nor on the moral fashions of the moment.
And if an innocent person can still be ruined with the same ease with which we scroll through a video, then the problem is not the ethics of form — it is our indifference.