Lessons (not) learnt.

The emergency caused by the new Hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship and the energy crisis triggered by Trump’s war with Iran have something profoundly similar about them. And I am not simply referring to the fact that both are frightening, or that they dominate newspaper headlines for a few weeks. I am referring to the very psychological and political structure of the emergency itself: two crises arriving only a handful of years after other almost identical crises, and therefore striking societies that are already stressed, already traumatised, already conditioned by recent experiences.

It does not take much to notice a certain resemblance between the current energy crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the one linked to the collapse of supply relations with Russia. The geopolitical actors change, the flags change, the television narratives of the moment change, yet the mechanism perceived by the public remains incredibly similar: suddenly people are once again talking about energy shortages, runaway prices, uncertain supplies, governments inviting citizens to “prepare”, industries at risk of slowdown, and families once again staring at their utility bills with the same exhausted expression they already wore a few years ago.

And it does not take much, either, to notice a clear analogy between the fear now emerging around this “new” virus and the fear experienced during the Coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19. Here too, even before the scientific data or the real danger of the pathogen itself become clear, the media and psychological ritual is immediately recognisable: the breaking news alerts, the television experts, the infection maps, passengers trapped on ships, smartphone footage leaking online, catastrophic hypotheses built on incomplete information, and above all that collective feeling of “here we go again”, which is perhaps the most important element of the entire phenomenon.

Because the real difference compared to twenty years ago is that emergencies no longer arrive in a society that is emotionally untouched. They arrive in populations carrying extremely recent memories of nearly identical emergencies, and therefore reacting not only to present facts, but also to the residual trauma of previous ones. In practice, every new crisis automatically inherits the emotional burden of the last one, almost like a form of compound interest applied to collective anxiety.

The problem, to be clear, is not cognitive. The most superficial and irrational explanation for all this is the claim that “the public has a short memory”, as though people rapidly forgot previous crises and therefore cyclically fell into the same panic over and over again. But that is not true at all. In fact, if we look carefully, the exact opposite is happening.

If there is already tension and fear surrounding a new virus today even before anyone fully understands how dangerous it may be, it is precisely because we remember very well what happened last time. At the beginning of COVID-19, by contrast, enormous numbers of people reacted almost dismissively. Remember? “It’s just a flu”, “those things happen far away”, “it won’t reach us”. There was a sort of underlying disbelief, partly because for most Western populations a real pandemic belonged to history books or disaster movies.

Today that psychological barrier no longer exists. The memory of COVID-19 is still extremely fresh, and therefore it takes far less to immediately reactivate the same emotional mechanisms: anxiety, suspicion, the rush toward worst-case scenarios, fear of quarantines, restrictions, overwhelmed hospitals, blocked supply chains, closed schools. We are not reacting only to the new virus: we are also reacting to the memory of the previous one.

Exactly the same thing applies to the energy crisis. If merely mentioning the Strait of Hormuz is now enough to instantly evoke scenarios of shortages, price surges and emergency measures, it is because we already lived through an energy crisis only a few years ago. People remember perfectly well the insane prices, exploding utility bills, arguments over heating, energy-intensive industries in trouble, governments talking about sacrifice and “reducing consumption”. And so, at the very first sign of renewed instability, the collective reaction begins far earlier, and far faster.

In short, the public does not have a short memory at all. If anything, the opposite problem exists: the recent memory of emergencies accumulates and remains there, ready to reactivate itself at the slightest resemblance to the previous crisis.

But then, if we remember previous crises so clearly, why are we still unprepared? The problem is not memory itself, but the fact that memory is almost never transformed into infrastructure.

The energy crisis should have produced a race to build better electrical grids, energy storage systems, distribution networks for electric vehicles, and genuine energy redundancy. The pandemic should have produced permanent mitigation systems: ventilation, epidemiological monitoring, more robust hospitals, ready-to-deploy emergency protocols.

Instead, we preserved the psychological trauma of the emergency, while building almost nothing capable of dealing with the next one. And so, as soon as something appears that resembles the previous crisis, the panic immediately returns.

We can ask ourselves the same question by introducing yet another crisis into the picture: the so-called AI crisis. Everywhere we hear that Europe is “falling behind”, that it has no giants comparable to Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Google or OpenAI. Wonderful.

But the real question is: why?

Do we genuinely want them?

Would Europeans truly want a European version of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and all the rest? Because the very same Europeans who today complain about the absence of “technology champions” are often also the ones proudly defending European regulations while accusing these companies of devastating public debate, attention spans, mental health, and even the development of younger generations.

At some point, a choice has to be made. Because one cannot simultaneously claim that this economic and social model is toxic, predatory and destructive, while also complaining that Europe failed to produce equivalent corporations of its own. Either those companies represent a problem, or they represent a model worth imitating. Sustaining both positions at the same time becomes increasingly difficult.

But did we not learn what happens when enormous IT corporations are allowed to grow to the scale of the American giants?

Introducing this third topic — namely the fact that we apparently did not learn “what happens when companies are allowed to grow this large” — helps calibrate the discussion more accurately. The question remains exactly the same: did we fail to learn from what happened?

Yes. But there is an important difference: the behaviour of the lobbies.

Regarding the IT world, lobbies are pushing hard for Europe to “do the right thing” by building “sovereign” computing infrastructure. And yes, they are lobbies. If we examine who stands behind the so-called sovereign cloud initiatives, for example, we find companies such as Deutsche Telekom, SAP, but also the Schwarz Group. Yes, the same group behind Lidl. One of the beneficiaries of the European sovereign cloud feeding frenzy is in fact STACKIT, the cloud provider owned by Schwarz Group, which has already secured several major contracts, including one with the Dutch government.

Yes, the same corporation that owns Lidl.

And therefore Europe must repeatedly say — and persuade people to believe — that what we truly need are European giants equivalent to Amazon or Microsoft Azure, simply because powerful local lobbyists want exactly that outcome, regardless of whatever lessons may have been learned from the United States.

And if we now look at who prevents us from reacting — or from being prepared — for energy shocks, who do we find? We find the chemical sector, the refineries and the European oil industry, obviously. It is certainly not the automotive industry that opposes replacing the vehicle fleet with electric alternatives.

On the contrary, the oil and petrochemical sectors want absolutely nothing to do with such a transition. And so, through the press, they constantly amplify the opinions of those arguing that it is “too early” to move away from fossil fuels.

And in exactly the same way, dealing with a viral emergency convinces almost nobody that serious preparation is actually necessary. Why? Because if we look at who emerged economically stronger during COVID-19, we mainly find large European industrial and financial groups with enormous lobbying capacity.

Who profited from COVID? Pharmaceutical corporations, large retail chains, digital platforms, logistics companies, electronic payment systems, telecommunications providers, delivery services and e-commerce giants. Not small marginal actors, but some of the most powerful economic groups in Europe.

• BioNTech achieved enormous profits thanks to COVID vaccines.
• DiaSorin experienced a boom in COVID diagnostic testing.
• Schwarz Group benefited heavily through Lidl and Kaufland during lockdowns.
• Carrefour saw increased domestic consumption during lockdowns.
• Ahold Delhaize experienced strong growth in food retail and delivery.
• Adyen benefited from the explosion of e-commerce and digital payments.
• Worldline expanded alongside the growth of cashless transactions during the pandemic.
• SAP benefited from accelerated digitalisation and remote work.
• Deutsche Telekom and the wider telecom sector saw huge increases in data traffic and remote working demand.
• HelloFresh experienced a boom in home food delivery.
• Zalando saw massive growth in online shopping.
• Just Eat Takeaway exploded during lockdown-driven delivery demand.
• Esselunga benefited enormously from lockdown-related growth in large-scale retail.
• Coop Italia saw increased domestic consumption.
• Amazon Italia Logistica expanded massively through e-commerce and home delivery growth.
• Intesa Sanpaolo benefited through state-backed financing management and banking concentration.

Do you think that is enough to build a lobbying structure?

The problem, then, is not that we fail to learn anything. As populations, we absolutely do learn. Crises leave deep scars: they change habits, alter priorities, and suddenly make visible fragilities that were previously ignored. After a pandemic, enormous numbers of people fully understand the value of an efficient public healthcare system, strategic reserves, scientific research and local industrial capacity. After an energy crisis, it becomes immediately obvious how dangerous dependence on foreign resources truly is.

And indeed, populations are often even willing to accept practical sacrifices in exchange for greater resilience: investments in healthcare, more autonomous energy infrastructure, shorter supply chains, domestic productive capacity, more robust emergency systems. At least immediately after a crisis, the consensus genuinely exists.

The real problem is that lobbies learn extremely well too. And what they learn is very simple: “energy crisis” means enormous flows of money, just as “pandemic” means new markets, extraordinary public funding, regulatory exemptions, economic concentration and opportunities for industrial consolidation.

Large economic structures, unlike ordinary people, possess permanent organisations, consultants, financial machinery and political influence that do not disappear when the emergency ends. Quite the opposite: crises often become unique opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Small businesses collapse, fragile competitors vanish, while large groups increase their market share, their influence and the degree of systemic dependence surrounding them.

And so we end up with politicians who, rhetorically, often say the correct things. They speak about prevention, strategic autonomy, resilience, healthcare security or energy independence. But when the time comes to decide how money will actually be spent, which infrastructure will be built, or which regulations will be written, they almost always end up accommodating the interests of the strongest and best-organised economic groups.

This is why I do not believe there is any real problem of collective memory. People remember perfectly well the crises they have lived through. The correct question is rather this: whose memory matters? Who actually possesses the power to transform that memory into permanent decisions? And above all: who has an economic interest in the way those crises are narrated, managed and ultimately “resolved”?

We learn.

But the lobbies learn too.