Idealists and Literature

 

People are seduced by their emotional deficiencies,
not by their intelligence: the conmen

Idealists do not know what to do with literature. In truth, they have never known what to do with it. When they confront it, they find themselves in a labyrinth. In every case, they feign before their readers an intelligence they lack, which only appears astonishing to those who, even worse than the idealists themselves, allow themselves to be charmed and fascinated by words that sound appealing simply because they do not understand them. And they fail to understand them because they mean nothing.

The worst thing about an ignorant person is not that they cannot distinguish a circle from a circumference, according to geometry, or an E-sharp from an F-natural, according to the chromatic scale. The worst thing is that they do not allow or tolerate others who are capable of making such distinctions and explaining them.

Literary criticism, especially since the Enlightenment and Romanticism, is oversaturated with people who believe that interpreting literature means writing and publishing "beautiful things" about it—from ectopic quotations of others’ metaphors to self-help phrases that can only flourish in the most basic emotions of a naïve and semantically impoverished third world.

People are seduced by their emotional deficiencies, not by their intelligence. This is well understood by all kinds of sophists, intellectuals, and merchants. And thus, they are led into the labyrinths of the 21st century, ensuring that no one can find their way out.

Individual ignorance leads to collective hypnosis. Because there is something worse than an ignorant person who does not know what literature is: I speak of the impostor who uses literature to deceive potential readers. To exploit literature to swindle others is perhaps as vile as using medicine to deprive a human being of life against their will and knowledge. For to deprive someone of an intelligent life is one of the greatest acts of cruelty and vileness that can occur in this world.

Jesús G. Maestro

The Mercatransmitters: What Are They and What Are They For?

 

Internet has achieved a true miracle: it has made useless, lazy, and redundant people, who are good for nothing, work for free as advertisers for others. It has turned them into advertising agents for those with initiative and originality, whether these are benign or malicious, depending on the purposes and criteria each individual or group holds about themselves or others, and pursues within the planetary network.

In my view, this is the greatest achievement of the sedative mercantile slavery ever seen in the history of commerce and human life. This process even has the luxury of giving them a few cents to further stimulate and preserve, even more effectively, their unhappy, dependent, and yearning servitude. This is what mercatransmitters do without being aware of it.

The emotional dependence and ideological magnetism that any message circulating on the internet provokes in a vulnerable mind—and no brain is without its Achilles’ heel—are superlative. Thus, the uncontrollable urge to forward, comment on, and promote it, increasingly in an unconsciously degraded manner, always benefits, and more than anyone else, the “big capital,” which moves—without lifting a finger—the mercantile and global relations inherent to the network. Internet turns any potential adversary into an advertiser. Perfect. Arguably the best advertiser. A mercatransmitter.

Note that on the internet there are no interpreters, only followers and detractors—don’t call them haters: hatred implies a minimal dose of voluntarism. On the internet, there are only engineers of commerce and emotional, parasitic commentators who recite others’ texts, crafted by the engineers of commerce.

Internet is, above all, retransmission of prior messages, which devalue as they are retransmitted, eventually leading to an aberrant transduction that dissolves itself in the infinite gumminess of the network. In other words: on the internet, there are only advertisers. Mercatransmitters. And a lot of neurosis, which is the engine of the global pseudoneuron. Internet has neuroticized the planet.

An internet user is an advertiser who does not know they are one. In this context, useless people today have an emotional capacity that big capital has skillfully mobilized, turning it into an extremely profitable labor force serving itself—that is, big capital. The cheapest labor is on the internet. It works devotedly for others, without others having to do anything. And it doesn’t know it. The most admirable thing is that this labor force is carried out and executed by human beings who are absolutely good for nothing. That’s why they are there. They are the mercatransmitters. The human resources of 21st-century advertising.

Jesús G. Maestro

The Mercatransmitters: What Are They and What Are They For?

Idealism Always Demands Censoring Reality

 

Idealism cannot tolerate reality. Nor can it allow you to do so. It cannot stand it, nor can it permit you to endure it. It is incompatible with reality and incompatible with you—unless you obey it blindly. Fanatically.  

Idealism is intolerant of reality, far more crudely than a pollen allergy is to pollen, because every idealist lives with their back to reality and declares themselves its enemy. For that very reason, they demand its censorship. Its extermination, which, etymologically, means stripping it of its seed.  

It is no coincidence that idealists are the primary human resources of totalitarianism—throughout all times. From the followers of the political idealism of The Republic by Plato, that chilling and aberrant book, to the blinded and obsessed devotees of Hitlerian Nazism, whose Lutheran, Kantian, and Darwinian genealogy proved decisive. Philosophy—the most sycophantic of courtesans and the most readily available concubine of moralists—always stands in the court of tyrants, always lies in the bed of religions, seducing and enlightening all with its ideals.  

Today, in the 21st century, idealists have taken over democracy. They have claimed it exclusively and oppressively. So, if you are not an idealist, you are not a democrat. Thus, idealism safeguards democracy—a fearsome safeguard. But what about the reality of democracy? In whose hands does it lie, and who will preserve it?  

Likewise, idealists have also seized the ideals of democracy’s enemies. Both sides—idealists all—have taken control of everything: the control of reality and its possible interpretations, whether institutional, political, or even scientific. They lead us—both de facto and de jure—into a world that declares itself incompatible with reality.  

Global commerce, with absolute virtuosity and professionalism, manages the trade of extreme idealisms, even those incompatible with our biological survival and that of any species or ecosystem. The sale of indulgences during the Christian Renaissance of 16th-century Europe is a mere joke compared to the trade of idealisms in the postmodernity of the 21st century.  

Non-idealist human rationalism has no political or advertising power. It sleeps in life, entirely silenced and powerless, the sleep of the righteous—or perhaps it sleeps in the morbid and complicit pleasure of cowardice. Only the dreams of idealists cause insomnia.  

I do not even want to imagine what—without doubt and without reservation—the reality’s response to such excessive irrationalism will be. Reality never remains idle, is insensitive to everything, like the fiercest of animals, and has always destroyed, both individually and collectively, those who act in ways incompatible with it.  

This is not the apocalypse; it is reality. A reality that is immortal because it is imperishable, inextinguishable, and intolerant—that is, eternal or *eviternal*, if you prefer. It is capable of violence always unprecedented and unexpected, for it is invisible and unpredictable. We mortals are the ones who perish. It is surprising that it is necessary to point out such an evident truth.  

Reality always wins and survives, despite the aberrations of all idealisms. And it survives at the cost of your own survival. Reality always collects its debts. It is no coincidence that failure is the distance separating idealists from reality.  

And the ultimate failure is nihilism—the greatest of all idealisms: the denial of the meaning of reality, a reality and a meaning with which the idealist human being is utterly incompatible.  

Let us not forget: reality is either material, or it does not exist. To speak of spirits, souls, and hidden meanings is already to invoke ghosts, to fall, once more in history, into moral ideals and seductive utopias, into supremacist discourses and emotional and intellectual tyrannies, and, in short, into philosophical practices—that is, into the conjuring of infinite specters, the choreography wielded by religions, ideologies, and idealisms of all stripes and dangers.  

Jesús G. Maestro

The Literary Poverty of the Enlightenment

 

The first thing the Anglo-German and French Enlightenment did was destroy literature—its own and everyone else's. Destroying its own wasn’t too difficult, we must acknowledge. Yet, every April 23, seizing the occasion of Cervantes’s eternal anniversary, they parade out Shakespeare. Shakespeare, the best friend of ghosts.

However, as I was saying, the Enlightenment, although it single-handedly ruins the interpretation of its own literatures and tries to ruin others as well, could not bring down Spanish literature, let alone the Golden Age. On the contrary, the result was one of admiration. A sublimation that, despite all its vaunted rationalism, Germany was never able to explain beyond epiphanies and mystical exclamations spilled across page after page by Goethe, Schiller, and the fraternal Schlegel brothers. All of them multi-purpose figures for various emotionally charged quotations, especially when there’s nothing to say.

This is what the Enlightenment owes to Romanticism—its verbose resonance, its academic euphony of hollow verses, behind which hides an unprecedented literary emptiness. All the same, no philosophical demands can silence literature. Nor is there any religious or political prohibition that can silence or intimidate it.

For that very reason, there is nothing more ironic or ridiculous than those writers and literature professors who, driven by who knows what kind of inertia or ignorance, call for a return to “Enlightened reason.” I don’t know if it’s an intellectual ritual practiced by those who, in the throes of philosophical or academic narcissism, seek visibility through any form of publicity. But what I do know is that such a declaration is utter nonsense.

Talking about “Enlightened reason” is galvanizing an oxymoron, within whose core lies the very extermination of literature. Enlightenment rationalism is incompatible with literary rationalism. It is a pseudo-philosophical rationalism, idealistic and narcissistic, like that of Plato and many others, which expels literature from the State and submerges the human being in a third semantic world, utopian and bleak. Literature is incompatible with “Enlightened reason.” The rationalism of literature does not fit within the idealism of philosophers nor in the self-deception of courtiers, academics, and their ilk.

Jesús G. Maestro

Sciences Against Ideologies

 

By defending ideologies so much, scientists have lost sight of science—that is, their own knowledge. The aim of science is the objective understanding of reality, a knowledge that by its nature must be scientific, critical, and systematic.

In contrast, ideologies, philosophies, and religions have a very different objective from sciences. Their goal is not to know or recognize reality, but to intervene in scientific knowledge in order to manipulate and distort it according to their own ideological, philosophical, or religious interests.

The independence of science from the power of religions, philosophies, and ideologies is absolutely necessary to preserve human life in the best possible conditions of freedom and intelligence.

It is the endless story of Plato against Homer, Belarmino against Galileo, Kant against Newton, Protestantism against Darwin, Nietzsche against Maxwell, Heidegger against Einstein... it is also the struggle of literature against its enemies, past and present.

Because literature, which is not at all a science, shares with the sciences the challenge of facing a triple alliance of adversaries: ideologues, philosophers, and gurus.

Jesús G. Maestro

State and Democracy

 

The State, as a political configuration established in the Modern Age, is not just in crisis, but in fact and by law, it is a totally powerless institution when faced with current events, and even more so with those to which the globalization of the 21st century is propelling us.

Similarly, and simultaneously, democracy is a system of government equally powerless to resolve conflicts that surpass its legal, economic, and political capacities.

However, human beings are incapable of finding either an alternative to the State as a political institution or a restoration of democracy. Let alone its necessary transformation or conversion into a political regime more favorable to the freedoms of honest, hardworking people, and much more respectful of each and every one of us.

Human life is an individual self-deception. Political life is a collective self-deception. But we all know that neither the State nor democracy are eternal or everlasting. And we also know that this knowledge is perfectly compatible with self-deception, both individual and collective.

Jesús G. Maestro

Boomers and Millennials

 

There is a generation with which the internet has conducted all sorts of experiments: the millennials. It is not they who experiment with the internet, no, but rather the internet with them. Without realizing it, they have become the first generation upon which the Anglosphere has relentlessly saturated its psychic and social laboratory. But they don’t know it. 

The present is too entertaining to stop and think about anything that might distract us. The internet trials are numerous and on a massive scale. Millennials are the blueprint for the new times. They have been chosen as human resources to test and verify the first and foremost manipulation of 21st-century globalization. 

They are the main protagonists of the largest experiment ever conducted to date on dominance, deception, and artifice. The consequences of this information radiation are only visible to certain professionals in specific sectors. But this is just the prelude. Because the experiment has worked wonderfully. And it remains highly active. 

The results, for now, are preserved. There are only two generational movements that are the vortex of our time: boomers and millennials. Everything else are peripheral groups that participate in one or the other spin cycle, assimilating or integrating into one of the two whirlwinds. And let’s not forget that millennials are a construction designed by the boomers.

Jesús G. Maestro