The social construction of “indebted man”: Economic crisis, discursive violence and the role of mass media in Italy

The “debt construction” represents an economic relationship inseparable from the production of the debtor subject and his morality. Debt produces a specific “morality”: The couple “effort-reward” of the ideology of work is doubled by the morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the fault (of having entered into it). The concept of guilt is derived from the notion of debts, and the morality of debt results in the moralization of the unemployed, the users of public services, as well as of entire populations. In this chapter we analyzed how in the italian mass media (one of the tools used to feel guilty citizens) the sacrifice has became the privileged social representation and how the image of the “indebted man” is affected by guilt and bad conscience.