We’re the good guys. That’s what we’ve always told ourselves. During fascism, “we weren’t like the Germans.” When it comes to the mafia, “we’re not like the Sicilians.” The myth of the good Italian has followed us for nearly a century. But every myth has its cost. Today, while the mafia evolves, infiltrates, and thrives, we keep telling ourselves it’s “not our problem.” It’s always someone else’s fault: the South, the politicians, the past. Meanwhile, the mafia is grateful; working undisturbed.
After World War II, Italy built its national identity on a comforting story: we were not like the Nazis. We were not truly fascist, not really collaborators, not actively complicit. We were victims, or at most, passive participants. This narrative of innocence helped the country move on without fully confronting its past (Ginsborg, 2003). A similar story has taken shape around the mafia. It’s something from the South. Something old. Something far away. Something others deal with. But these are not facts, they are fictions, sustained by powerful cognitive shortcuts.
When major anti-mafia operations take place in northern Italy, they rarely make front-page news. Yet investigations like Aemilia, Infinito, and countless local cases in the North have uncovered extensive criminal networks tied to the ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra, and Cosa Nostra. These groups are not just operating, they are thriving, investing in real estate, logistics, tourism, and even renewable energy (Sciarrone, 2011). But public perception lags behind reality. Why? Partly because the mafia in the North wears suits, not leather jackets. There are no shootouts in the streets, no bombs in piazzas. This absence of cinematic violence triggers the omission bias: we assume that what isn’t visible isn’t dangerous. Meanwhile, the outgroup bias reassures us that this is still someone else’s problem. Clean streets and stylish storefronts help maintain the illusion: this can’t be mafia territory. And yet, it is.
In today’s political discourse, the mafia is rarely mentioned, not because it’s gone, but because it’s inconvenient. It doesn’t fit into easy slogans. It can’t be blamed on Brussels, migrants, or political opponents. It’s a complex, entrenched system that implicates not just criminals, but often businessmen, professionals, and politicians (Dickie, 2007). Talking about it would require responsibility. So we default to silence. The media covers sensational crimes, not slow corruption. Politicians talk about “security” but rarely about anti-mafia policies. The public, meanwhile, turns to more digestible enemies. This is where motivated reasoning takes over: we justify the absence of the mafia from the conversation because facing it would force us to change. We accept the illusion because it’s safer than the truth. And the mafia doesn’t need propaganda, it only needs our indifference.
What Italy shows us, then, is not a national pathology, but a human one. The tendency to accommodate what should be condemned, to normalize what should be exceptional, is not bound by borders. It’s a psychological reflex with global reach. Wherever organized crime, systemic injustice, or institutional rot manage to blend into daily life, the same mechanisms of omission, justification, and selective memory come into play. Italy’s case is a lens, not an outlier, a concentrated example of how societies make peace with the very things that threaten them.
This widespread indifference can also be explained through the lens of the normalcy bias. As Kahneman and Tversky (1973) explained, people tend to underestimate the possibility of a crisis if it hasn’t happened to them directly or recently. Applied to the mafia, this means that in regions where mafia violence is less visible, people are more likely to believe that the problem has disappeared, making citizens and institutions slower to react.
Furthermore, the narrative bias plays a key role. We prefer stories with clear villains and heroes, not intricate webs of financial fraud, legal loopholes and gray zones. The mafia does not offer an easy narrative, it is embedded, systemic, and ambiguous. This makes it cognitively demanding to understand and emotionally taxing to accept. So, we unconsciously simplify it or ignore it altogether.
Cognitive psychology also teaches us how deeply our perception of risk is shaped by familiarity and salience. According to Slovic (1987), risks that are invisible, unfamiliar, or politically charged are less likely to provoke concern, even when they are objectively dangerous. The mafia, by embedding itself in legitimate markets and avoiding overt violence, becomes cognitively “safe” in the minds of the public. Its very strategy exploits what Sunstein (2003) refers to as probability neglect: the tendency to ignore the actual likelihood of harm when it’s abstract or emotionally muted. This explains how entire regions can be heavily infiltrated without triggering public alarm.
Historically, this process of denial and rationalization isn’t new. During Italy’s so-called First Republic, political alliances with organized crime were an open secret, often justified as a necessary evil to maintain order or win elections (Ginsborg, 2003). In the 1960s and ’70s, collusion between the state and mafia figures intensified, culminating in the brutal murders of magistrates, journalists, and police officers in the 1980s and early ’90s. Yet after the shock of Falcone and Borsellino’s assassinations faded, the narrative shifted again—from national outrage to national forgetfulness. The mafia never disappeared; it adapted. But Italy, politically and culturally, did not adapt with it. Today’s organized crime is more complex, more elusive and more embedded than ever before—but we are still fighting it with the wrong stories.
Fighting the mafia requires more than arrests and court cases. It demands a cultural shift, a readiness to confront not just the criminal, but the mirror. As long as we see the mafia as a relic of the past, or a problem for “the South,” we play right into its hands. It survives not only through violence or corruption, but through omission, denial, and convenient silence. If we want to challenge it, we must first challenge the stories we tell ourselves. We didn’t just ignore the mafia. We normalized it. We looked away. We buried the memory. We killed Falcone, then moved on.
References:
Dickie, J. (2007) Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Ginsborg, P. (2003) Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sciarrone, R. (2011) Mafie vecchie, mafie nuove: Radicamento ed espansione. Roma: Donzelli Editore.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), pp.207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9
Slovic, P. (1987). Perception of risk. Science, 236(4799), pp.280–285. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3563507
Sunstein, C.R. (2003). Terrorism and probability neglect. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 26(2), pp.121–136. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024111006336
B.BIAS 