Il mito del nemico come gioco sociale non-morale

In this paper we show how an elementary machinery from game theory can grasp, in a partial but nevertheless significant way, some fundamental aspects of the social interaction behind the myth of the enemy, i.e., the social attitude that treats the Other as radically different and as a threat, excluding it from the social interaction itself and, at the same time, enhancing the symbolic value of this exclusion to reinforce one’s own identity and to justify difficult choices to be made in hard social games. The basic idea is that the exclusion of the Other expresses a symbolic value among similar agents and supports alternative criteria for the rational choice.