ABSTRACT
The peasants or artisans who succeed in fleeing "la miseria" and enter government service carry their mentality of mutual distrust and the petty curiosity of small communities into the police forces of the State. One of the chief characteristics of traditional peasant cultures is that for them "history", as well as the natural factors of the environment, belongs to the realm of the given. That is to say, peasants see themselves as subject to the workings of history but scarcely as makers of it. In this respect the peasants of Calabria and Lucania differ in no way from the rural populations of other parts of the world. The lack of continuity between reality and ideality, the inability to "achieve" or to "realize", leads in the world of "la miseria" to the desire to flee the ugly reality of everyday life and to reach, by a magic leap, the "other", the ideal side of existence.
