Alessandro 'kLeZ' Accardo personal website

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If the tree falls and nobody listens

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A few days ago I watched a video about Calla Walsh, a twenty-two-year-old American woman who in six years went from Democratic Party election campaigns to the stages of Iranian state television. The video came from an Italian channel about communication, and at one point its author stops to state his method: this isn’t a geopolitics video, he says, he deals with communication, and his aim is to give us the tools to form our own opinion. It’s a purpose I respect, and that is exactly why it annoyed me to watch it betrayed minute after minute. It starts with the title, keywords in capitals, about the child prodigy who now celebrates dead Americans. It carries on through the almost sole source of the story, a profile published by The Free Press that he himself calls “beautiful”. And it ends with an inaccuracy that whoever made the video could have checked in five minutes, even written in an on-screen caption (Walsh was born in 2004, not 2005).

Having an opinion is normal, and I have one too. But if you present yourself as the one who analyses communication without taking sides, word choice is exactly where impartiality stands or falls, and there it fell. I told him so in a comment, and while writing it I realised the interesting part of this story was a question the video barely touched at the end, when it talked about institutions that can no longer pick up the anxiety of an entire generation. What happens to a person when they talk, and talk, and talk, and nobody listens?

§From Cambridge to Tehran

Calla Walsh’s story, laid out with dates, is frighteningly linear.

She is born on 9 June 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most progressive cities in the United States. At fifteen, in 2019, she is among the organisers of the Boston climate strike. In 2020, between fifteen and sixteen, she volunteers for Elizabeth Warren and then for the re-election of Senator Ed Markey, and becomes one of the most visible figures of the so-called Markeyverse, the network of kids who on social media drag the youth vote towards a senator in his seventies with an enthusiasm nobody expected. At seventeen she is the youngest delegate at the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America and writes in Teen Vogue to rally her generation. The papers describe her as a rising star.

Then something breaks. In 2021 Markey declares there is “no justification” for Hamas rockets, and she organises a protest letter and speaks bluntly of betrayal. In December of the same year she leaves the DSA and announces she is done with electoral politics. Over the next two years she goes to Cuba with the solidarity brigades, and after 7 October 2023 she moves to direct action: on 30 October she is arrested during a break-in at the offices of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company, in Cambridge, and on 20 November on the roof of another of the same company’s plants, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. In October 2024 she pleads guilty to minor offences and serves sixty days in prison. On her way out she says she would do it again, and do it better.

In 2025 she is in Tehran, a guest at a state television festival, and from the stage she chants “death to America, death to Israel”. Since September she has lived in Beirut. When on 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel kill Ali Khamenei, she writes that those she calls Israeli and American officials are legitimate targets wherever they are, and in the following months she cheers the deaths of American soldiers. In July she is at Khamenei’s funeral. In May more than seventy-two thousand people followed her on X, where she reposts Hezbollah statements. Her parents have written that, despite some differences of opinion, they respect her and love her very much.

What she has written since moving to Beirut must be firmly condemned, but a condemnation that comes before understanding is the most convenient way to learn nothing.

§If a tree falls in a forest

There’s an old philosophical riddle everyone knows: if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s often attributed to Berkeley, who never actually wrote about it. The earliest printed versions date from the late nineteenth century, in an American popular science magazine in 1883 and in Scientific American the year after, and the form we know comes from a 1910 physics textbook. But the clearest answer had been given two centuries earlier by John Locke, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, when he distinguished the primary qualities of bodies, such as shape and motion, from secondary qualities, such as colours and sounds, which exist only in the encounter with whoever perceives them.

Take away the sensation of them; let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ear hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell, and all colours, tastes, odours, and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e. bulk, figure, and motion of parts.

For Locke, then, the falling tree moves the air, but without an ear there is no sound. What remains is the motion, the cause, and nothing more.

On the other side there’s the naive materialist’s position, the one that seems obvious: the tree is a physical thing, the air vibrates, the sound is there whether anyone hears it or not. And it is, almost word for word, the position of power when someone complains about not being listened to. You’ve got every tool, they tell you: you can vote, you can write, you can post, you can sign a petition, you can record a video and show it to millions of people. They don’t understand why you have this paranoia about not being heard, since these days everyone has a voice.

I’m with Locke: a voice isn’t vibrating air, it’s a relationship between the one who speaks and the one willing to listen, and if the second is missing what’s left is air moving through the atmosphere, however loud and however often repeated. That’s why the apparent paradox of our age, a generation with more tools to speak than any other in history that nonetheless feels mute, stops being a paradox as soon as you notice that the microphone is there and what’s missing is the ear.

§Exit, voice and loyalty

To understand what happens to people who speak without being heard, there’s a book by an economist, published in 1970, that might as well have been written for the purpose: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman. The starting idea is simple. When an organisation deteriorates, be it a company, a party or a state, its members have two ways to react. They can leave, that is switch supplier, quit the party, emigrate, and Hirschman calls this exit. Or they can stay and protest, that is write, complain, organise, and this is voice. What decides between the two is loyalty, the attachment that keeps you inside even when things go badly and pushes you to use your voice rather than leave.

The two reactions balance like a seesaw. The easier it is to exit, the less voice gets used, because switching is more convenient than fighting. It works the other way too: an organisation that stifles voice pushes people towards the exit. Hirschman came back to it in 1993, with an essay on the end of East Germany, where in 1989 the mass flight to the West had driven those who stayed into the streets, and exit and voice ended up working together until the regime fell.

With these three concepts in hand, Calla Walsh’s story slots in almost perfectly. At the start there’s loyalty, enormous, of a sixteen-year-old who spends her days campaigning for a senator of her party. Then there’s voice, used inside the party, with letters, appeals, public pressure. Then the voice finds no ear, and she calls it betrayal. At that point comes the first exit, from the DSA and from electoral politics. Outside the institutions the voice gets louder, becomes direct action, smoke bombs, paint, broken windows, prison. And finally comes the second exit, the definitive one, from her country, and the crossing over to the other side, where someone listens to her all right, in fact puts her on a stage.

There’s a line, reported by the Boston Globe, that to my mind explains everything better than any theory. During the Markey campaign his opponent’s staff had publicly accused the Markeyverse kids of poisoning the online climate, and this is how she took it: “They are scared of me, a random teenager on the internet […] Hey, they’re scared of us. We have power over them”. The first time she felt heard by power was when she frightened it. If a voice only reaches the ear of those in charge when it scares them, whoever wants to be heard learns to scare, and that is a problem for those who don’t listen long before it’s a problem for those who shout.

§Thoughts, words, deeds

When they try to explain why a person abandons moderation, psychologists of radicalisation almost always start from Arie Kruglanski, who built a theory around the quest for significance. The need to feel important, to count for something, to be respected is universal. When a person loses it, through humiliation, through injustice suffered, through failure, the drive to regain it can become so strong that it crushes every other goal in life, work, family, relationships, until only one is left. Kruglanski and his colleagues sum up the conditions in three words: needs, narratives that split the world into absolute good and evil, and networks of people who confirm and amplify those narratives. Calla Walsh had all three, and in the right order. But this story is not new, and not even from this century.

In May 1898 in Milan people take to the streets because bread is too expensive. General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris has cannons fired on the crowd: eighty dead according to official figures, around three hundred according to witnesses. King Umberto I decorates him with the Grand Officer’s cross of the Military Order of Savoy and a month later makes him a senator. Gaetano Bresci, a Tuscan textile worker who had emigrated to Paterson, New Jersey, comes back to Italy for the purpose, and on 29 July 1900 in Monza he shoots the king, who dies on the spot. At his trial he says he killed him because he was responsible for all the pale and bleeding victims of the system he represented.

Almost eighty years later, in the United States, there’s Ted Kaczynski, a child prodigy who entered Harvard at sixteen, where he took part in a psychology experiment made of humiliating confrontations that he would carry with him all his life. He becomes a mathematician, teaches at Berkeley, resigns in 1969 without explanation and withdraws to a cabin in Montana. From 1978 to 1995 he mails bombs that kill three people and injure twenty-three, until he gets the Washington Post to publish his manifesto against industrial society, and it’s the manifesto itself that gives him away, because his brother David recognises the style and turns him in.

Calla Walsh has a lot in common with Kaczynski: precocious intelligence, enormous expectations, a personal wound, a cause that at some point eats everything else. The conclusions, though, are different. She could have planted bombs and didn’t, she could have shot one of the politicians she hates and didn’t, she could have become a homegrown terrorist and instead chose to leave and to talk. If the yardstick is the terrorist, Walsh is “moderate”, and the inverted commas are the whole point of the comparison.

There’s an ancient formula I know from a film, Bohemian Rhapsody, where Freddie Mercury’s father repeats it to his son like a family heirloom. It’s the heart of Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia, and it’s said in three Avestan words, humata, hukhta, hvarshta: good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

I celebrate my praises for good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, for my thoughts, my speeches, and (my) actions.

For me moderation is all here, in this three-step ladder, and radicalisation is the descent down the same ladder. You start with thoughts, move on to words, end up at deeds. Bresci and Kaczynski reached the bottom. Calla Walsh stopped at the second step, and it’s an extremely serious step, because whoever cheers the death of other human beings, whoever they are, has already lost the thing that keeps us moderate in words and therefore, sooner or later, in deeds: humanity. And it’s quite an irony of history that this formula comes from Persia, the very land where Walsh went looking for the hearing she was denied at home, and where a regime that calls itself revolutionary shoots at protesters.

§The loss of humanity, on both sides

Calla Walsh breathed that loss of humanity in the air she grew up in, and that makes her story uncomfortable for everyone.

Social psychology has a name for this mechanism, dehumanisation, and has studied it for decades. Nick Haslam, in a 2006 review that became a standard reference, distinguishes two ways of stripping someone of their humanity: treating them as an animal, lacking culture and self-control, or as an object, lacking warmth and emotion. Albert Bandura, back in 1999, had explained how perfectly ordinary people come to commit atrocities by switching off their own morality through a series of steps, and one of the most effective is precisely to stop seeing the victim as a person. In 2015 Nour Kteily and his colleagues did something very simple and chilling: they showed samples of Americans the classic ascent-of-man image, from the stooped ape to the upright human, and asked them to place various human groups along that scale. Muslims ended up on average between twelve and fifteen points out of a hundred below Americans, and in a survey of thirteen Muslim and Arab groups they came out the lowest of all. And those who placed them lowest were also more in favour of torture and drone strikes.

You don’t need a lab to see it. On 25 May 2020, in Minneapolis, a police officer keeps his knee on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while he repeats that he can’t breathe. On 19 July this year, in the Pilastro district of Bologna, Abderrahim Fakir dies during a police intervention, and in the video you can hear him repeating “I can’t breathe”; the prosecutor’s office is investigating for manslaughter, and thanks to a register introduced this year by the government, the modello 45 bis, those who were there are not, for now, technically under investigation. Since Carlo Giuliani, killed in Genoa in 2001 by a carabiniere’s pistol shot, Italy’s list of people who died after an arrest or in custody is long and well known: Federico Aldrovandi in Ferrara in 2005, for whom four police officers received final convictions in 2012, Stefano Cucchi in Rome in 2009, for whom two carabinieri were sentenced to twelve years for unintentional homicide only in 2022, Giuseppe Uva, Riccardo Magherini, and more besides. On 6 April 2020, in the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison, prison officers beat defenceless inmates for hours; the trial, with a hundred and five defendants, is still ongoing, and meanwhile some of the accused officers have gone back on duty. And on the night between 21 and 22 July 2001, at the Diaz school in Genoa, the police beat dozens of sleeping people to a pulp and arrested ninety-three of them, and in the end they were all promoted, the butchers and the ones who sent them, while the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for torture in a country that didn’t even have torture as a crime.

On the other side of the ocean, dehumanisation has become government policy. Donald Trump calls his opponents “vermin” and says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and in the administration’s official language people who cross a border in search of a better life are “illegal aliens”, which sounds more like a sci-fi film than a statute. In March 2025 the government sent around two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans to CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison, invoking a 1798 wartime law that hadn’t been used since the Second World War; most of them had no criminal record, a federal judge later ruled that the hundred and thirty-seven expelled under that law had been denied due process, and Human Rights Watch documented torture and ill-treatment. And the naval base at Guantanamo, the one with the prisoners held without trial in the war on terror, has also been used for migrants.

One of those flights tells you everything else. Maiker Espinoza Escalona enters the United States in May 2024 with his wife and two-year-old daughter, Maikelys, to claim asylum. The parents end up in detention and the little girl is placed with the federal refugee office. On 29 March 2025 the father is sent to Guantanamo, the next day to CECOT, accused, without proof, of gang membership. On 25 April the mother is deported to Venezuela, alone, because the Department of Homeland Security decided to take the child off the flight “for her safety and welfare”. Maikelys spent weeks in foster care in the United States, with her father in a Salvadoran prison and her mother in Venezuela, until she was handed back to her mother in Caracas on 14 May, aged two. Nobody who considers that family to be made of people just like their own could do such a thing.

The police officer who doesn’t consider the man under his knee to be human, the officer who beats a handcuffed inmate, the government that separates a little girl from her parents because they come from the wrong place, and the young woman in Beirut celebrating the death of four soldiers are doing, each on their own side, exactly the same thing. They have stopped seeing the other as a human being, and without that humanity there’s nothing left to keep thoughts, words and deeds moderate.

§The problem is cultural

Blaming the regime of the day and closing the matter would be convenient, and it’s a mistake we Italians know better than anyone, because it’s what we did after the war.

In 1946 the amnesty signed by Togliatti, then Minister of Justice, hastily settles accounts with fascism, and the country builds itself a comfortable story that the historian Filippo Focardi called the myth of the bad German and the good Italian: the blame lay with the Nazis, with the executioners, with a few party bosses, and the Italians, decent folk, had merely been dragged along. Angelo Del Boca spent a lifetime dismantling that myth, recounting the gas in Ethiopia and the concentration camps in Libya. We tried those who had fired the shots too little and too badly, and as a people we never came to terms with the ideas that had made the shooting possible. And those ideas, eighty years on, are still here, in government, for almost five years now.

With the United States we risk making the same mistake. Jonathan Rauch, who for years refused to use the word, wrote a long piece in the Atlantic in January with the blunt title “Yes, It’s Fascism”, in which he compares the Trump government with the historical traits of fascism one by one, and dehumanisation is just one of the criteria it meets.

Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.

Back in October 2024 it had been said to the New York Times by a source you can’t get much closer to the president than: John Kelly, his former chief of staff, a Marine general, according to whom Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist”. Rauch, however, concludes that a fascist president doesn’t make the country a fascist country, because the courts, the states and the press remain independent. And this is where I part ways with him, because a regime isn’t born in a vacuum, and Trump was elected twice by a people that has practised dehumanisation since long before him.

In July 1845, a hundred and eighty years ago, the journalist John O’Sullivan writes that it is the “manifest destiny” of Americans to overspread the whole continent allotted by Providence, and those who were already there, the natives and the Mexicans, become an obstacle on the path of a divine plan. In 1882 Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law in American history to bar entry to an entire people as such. On 12 March 1947, in the speech that inaugurates the Cold War, Harry Truman tells Congress that the world is split in two.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

On 20 September 2001, nine days after the Twin Towers, George W. Bush gives it its definitive form.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

And in September 2025, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, Stephen Miller, Trump’s most powerful adviser, addresses opponents like this: “You are nothing. You are wickedness”. Rauch uses it as an example of politics understood as war between enemies, in the manner of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who gave Nazism its theoretical foundation.

This division of the world into us and them doesn’t stay on paper; it can be measured. In 2024 three economists, Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, compared affective polarisation, that is how much voters of one party loathe those of the other, across twelve OECD countries over the last forty years, and the United States is the country where it grew the most. In a system where only two parties count, and where you’re therefore either on this side or that, politics inevitably becomes tribal warfare, and the two-party system stops being an institutional choice and becomes the mirror of a culture.

That’s why I think the United States, as a people, ought to lose everything, and that doesn’t mean wishing suffering on anyone. I wish that country a cultural crisis deep enough to force it to face up to what it has embraced for a hundred and eighty years: “with us or against us”, exceptionalism, the idea that anything not Western is worth a bit less, those twelve to fifteen points on the evolution scale. It’s the crisis Italy never had the courage to go through, and we’re still paying the price. Without looking at this level, the cultural one, the root causes stay invisible.

§Why it’s worse today

Calla Walsh’s generation has also understood something else, which those in power pretend not to see: history has been through plenty of crises, some worse than this one, but none this fast. The crises of old arose and were resolved slowly, over generations, and there was time to understand them, debate them, change course. Today everything moves too fast to be governed.

Anyone who has read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which for me is still the finest of his books, knows Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, the science that predicts the behaviour of large masses over the long run and makes it possible to tackle the Seldon crises, those moments when history narrows until only one way out is left. The Plan works because it has time, centuries, and because individuals count for little compared with the masses. Then along comes the Mule, a mutant with a power no equation could have predicted, and the Plan falls apart. Today the Mule has a first name and a surname. Since 14 October the Starshield terminals, the military version of Starlink that Ukraine relies on to shoot down Russian drones, have been throttled without any warning so as not to work above 160 kilometres per hour, which is exactly when interceptor drones need them to chase Russian jet drones, and the restriction lasted ten days. According to the Wall Street Journal the order came from Elon Musk, who admitted throttling Starlink, accusing the Ukrainians of violating the terms of use, and according to Zelensky people died in the meantime. One man, with a gut decision, took away from a country at war, for ten days, one of the tools it defends itself with.

Sociology has given this feeling a rigorous form. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls it social acceleration: technology accelerates, social change accelerates, the pace of life accelerates, and the three feed each other, driven among other things by the logic of competition and growth. The result is what Rosa calls desynchronisation: democratic politics needs time, to debate, mediate, decide, while markets and technology move at a speed that makes every decision arrive late. Democratic power falls behind, and whoever runs ahead of everyone grabs the space politics leaves empty.

Faced with this, power could have listened, and chose to gag. In Italy the first act of the Meloni government, in October 2022, was the anti-rave decree. In 2025 came the security decree, which among other things makes a crime of blocking a road with your own body, that is the most elementary form of peaceful protest, and which the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights had asked the Senate not to pass without substantial changes. This year another one arrived, which touched the rules on arrests during demonstrations and introduced that same 45 bis register from the Fakir case. In February 2024, in Pisa, the police baton-charged a student march, and it took the President of the Republic to step in and say that using batons on kids is a sign of failure. People injured, sometimes killed, and always intimidated, at every demonstration.

And power is no longer just that of governments. In Brazil, during the Jair Bolsonaro years, Federal Police investigations based on the national security law rose by 285% compared with previous governments, and among those investigated were even a cartoonist and a columnist for their criticism of the president, and the country sank as low as a hundred and eleventh in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index; after he left it climbed back up to fifty-second place this year, above the United States for the first time in twenty-five years. In September 2025 Bolsonaro was sentenced to twenty-seven years and three months for organising a coup. In October, in the run-off between Lula and his son Flávio, the electoral court had to order Zuckerberg’s company to give both candidates equal treatment, after its artificial intelligence had generated campaign images of Flávio and refused the same requests for Lula, and two years earlier Musk’s platform had been suspended across the whole country for refusing to carry out judges’ orders. Flávio lost, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered him to hand over his passports, and he fled to Miami with his wife and daughters, where the US State Department hastened to let it be known it would grant them visas. Today’s United States welcomes with open arms the son of a convicted coup plotter and sends people who asked for asylum to a foreign prison.

§Berkeley was right, in a way he never imagined

The tree paradox is attributed to Berkeley, who never wrote it, but he would have had an answer, and today it sounds prophetic. For him things exist only insofar as they are perceived, esse est percipi, so how does a tree nobody is looking at keep existing? It exists because there is always someone perceiving it: God, who sees everything.

Today’s power is rather like that god. Someone who perceives everything really does exist, and it’s whoever collects the data. Every post, every like, every search, every second spent watching a video is recorded, measured, stored, sold. Your voice is heard all right, by a machine that listens to you in order to profile you and sell you something, and that has no intention whatsoever of answering you or changing anything. So the paradox of the voice without a listener has a simple and horrible solution: the voice gets recorded, with nobody there ready to listen to it. I’ve already written about social media, and about how it’s built to record you this way, here and here.

§A warning

Those who shout need to know that violence, besides being wrong, doesn’t work. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied 323 resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006, and the nonviolent ones achieved their goals in 53% of cases, the violent ones in 26%, that is half as often. Calla Walsh, by cheering death, doesn’t bring the end of the empire she has learned to hate a millimetre closer, and she hands that empire the perfect excuse not to listen to anyone who thinks, wholly or partly, as she does.

The warning, though, is above all for those who don’t listen. Calla Walsh had the means, the family, the education, the network, the money to get on a plane and go shout from the other side of the world. Most of the young people who feel the way she does don’t. They stay at home, with the same anger and nowhere to take it, and some of them, sooner or later, will stop stopping at words. Bresci and Kaczynski are what happens when a deaf power meets someone who has decided to be heard at any cost. It happened in 1900, it happened in 1978, and it will happen again, here too, on our own doorstep, if those in charge keep answering questions with batons, special laws and promotions for the butchers of the people.

And those in charge today no longer sit only in parliaments. They sit on the boards of companies whose market capitalisation exceeds the gross domestic product of entire countries, run by men who decide on their own whether an army can defend itself, which candidate deserves a generated image, which voice gets amplified and which gets left to fall into the void, and who answer only to their shareholders. It’s a capitalism that long ago stopped pretending to serve people, took off its mask and grabbed all the space that politics, slow and spineless, left it, turning dissent into data to sell and anger into time-on-platform. Complicit and compliant governments, oligarchs who buy politics and bend it to their gut decisions, police forces that dehumanise and get rewarded for it: it’s this rabble that taught a generation that to be heard you have to instil fear, and if one day that lesson is learned all the way through, they will have no right whatsoever to be surprised.

A generation that cannot exit its own future, because there’s no exit from the planet, and that uses its voice with nobody listening, has only two roads ahead: resign itself or raise its voice. It’s up to those in power to decide which, by listening now. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds: the formula applies to them too, and they’re the first to have forgotten it.

§Sources