Like many, I too were deeply disturbed by the death of Andrea Prospero, a young 19 -year -old student who decided to commit suicide last January. The most shocking aspect of this tragic story is the total lack of empathy shown by his “Telegram friends”, with whom he seems, he had ended up in a round of web scammers.

Where does cruelty come from?

It would have been one of these “friends”, a neo -Nodician year old, to push him to suicide, indicating the ways and even providing him with the drugs used (on this point a third person seems to be involved on this point). The question we all ask ourselves is: where does so much cruelty come from? Where is the natural empathy that should take action in the face of the suffering of others? In the case of Prospero, then, the accused was his almost peers, which should have encouraged an even stronger empathic link. I read dozens of articles on the story, trying to find an answer to this question, until I came across a term: nihilism.

Nihilistic

According to an article by Corriere della Serathe alleged instigator of the suicide of Prospero would have sometimes called himself “nihilistic”. This term can have different meanings, not all necessarily negative, but among young people it is often used to express a deep contempt for human life. For many boys and girls, existence has no intrinsic purpose, and this vision could, in some cases, feed a misanthropic attitude. Another key element of this story is the digital component.

Dehumanize people

Our empathetic mechanisms, which are the basis of prosocial behavior, seem to activate much less online. On the web it is easier to dehumanize someone who has never met in person. This also explains the diffusion of the language of hatred and the lack of sensitivity on social media, attitudes that are more rarely observed in face -to -face interactions. To this is added the perennial boredom of many young people, constantly looking for entertainment. In such a context, even human life can become a game, a diversion. The suffering of others can be caused and fed for pure fun, in a moral and existential void.

Andrea Prospero’s suffering

Finally, the group dynamics: how many have witnessed the suffering of Andrea Prospero without doing anything? Unfortunately, in these cases what is called “spectator effect” is activated in psychology: the more people witness an emergency situation, the more the perception of individual responsibility decreases. “Let’s make the Caz*Our”, he would have written a member of the Telegram chat while Andrea was dying, alone. This expression, “let us make the caz*our”, is the emblem of the growing social passivization and the disintegration of the human ties to which we are witnessing. Nihilism, the digital component and the spectator effect could therefore be among the main factors that contributed to this tragedy. There will certainly be others, perhaps never completely known, because we cannot enter the mind of the protagonists. However, obsessed on the morbid details of the story will not serve much. What really matters is to stop to reflect: only through collective confrontation and mutual support can we hope to overcome the limits inherent in our human nature.