The Frontiers of Globalization

 

Globalization aims to erase territorial borders in order to impose estate-like ones. Geographical, political, or national differences disappear, because States, both in fact and in law, disintegrate, homogenizing people, customs, and objectives, and neutralizing, of course, human freedoms as well. For the differences—ever increasing—are now estate-based, social, financial. And they will become even more radical, until the abyss between rich and poor proves entirely impassable.

We no longer live in countries, but in political systems homogenized across diverse and distant geographies. We live, in reality, in a world of invisible frontiers. They are perhaps the cruelest of all limitations, for a very simple reason: they make us lose awareness of who we are and what we need; that is, they deprive us of knowledge of difference—and of recognition of equality. Our children will not know who they are, nor where they are, nor for whom they work.

Meanwhile, the human being of the twenty-first century—and I refer specifically to those who live and survive in the so-called democratic Western societies—does nothing but play at being childishly surprised by the consequences of his own irresponsibilities. He lives, in truth, within the idealism that, with globalist and mercantile pretensions, has been designed by the Anglosphere.

When we encounter someone who collects four-leaf clovers, claims to draw circumferences of infinite radius with both hands, or asserts that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote inspired by the commercial law of the Nibelungs, we are not simply faced with a three-headed adynaton, but with something far more elementary and common. We are faced with a password, a watchword. Such a thing is not an argument or an opinion. It is the sign and countersign that our interlocutor speaks, writes, and lives in a third semantic world—and does not know it.

In certain contexts, to argue against nonsense is to become part of it. From this perspective, opinion—which is the virus of ignorance—devours absolutely everything.

In the twenty-first century, Western democracies—in reality almost the only ones—dissolve into absurd ideologies, institutionally represented by ignorant politicians, incompetent professionals, or useless rulers. The global market supplants the State and renders irrelevant whatever emerges from the ballot boxes in any electoral process, because it makes no difference who governs: the one who rules is the market. Democracy is now a puppet in the hands of international commerce.

And it is so because the market is more competent than the State. Executives and commercial professionals are far better prepared than the politicians who claim to serve democracy. And they are far more hardworking and responsible than politicians, whether we like to admit it or not. The friends of commerce work much harder at their jobs than the friends of democracy do at theirs. Financial elites take care of their interests much more—and much better—than the people do of theirs. Today the people seem to have forgotten themselves and to have lost sight of their political role and protagonism in this world.

Some of the chapters in this book are the result of lectures delivered orally at different universities and academic institutions; therefore, in their textual transcription they preserve the original tone of living and direct discourse.

Taken as a whole, the volume seeks to offer a reflection removed from internet quarrels and demanding of highly cautious personal considerations, which press upon the sore point of human rationalism in search of political forms capable of preserving freedom in a world globalized by the market—where ideologies continue to speak of democracy and equality while money irreversibly hierarchizes life.

The frontiers of globalization are extremely silent and invisible. The senses do not perceive them clearly. But our pockets do.

The democracy of the twenty-first century stands before—unfulfilled—all the promises of the European Enlightenment: perpetual peace, equality before the law, the genuine separation of the three political powers, the secularization of human life vis-à-vis religious and ecclesiastical institutions, the defense of private property, the right to individual liberty, and the stellar and idealized goal of happiness. The Enlightenment failed to fulfill all its promises. Not a single one of its postmodern advocates declares this open secret, which no one dares to mention. And everyone knows it.

Will democracy be able to pay for the broken dishes of the Europeanist and Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment? Sometimes, in order to be able, one must also be willing. It would undoubtedly be most regrettable if future historians were to have reason to conclude that twenty-first-century democracy was the failure of the Enlightenment: the imperfect objective of materializing a project that was ill-fated and unfortunate from its very idealistic and totalitarian conception. The Enlightenment is the executioner of democracy.

And I am concerned that, under this Enlightened imperative, democracy in the twenty-first century may become the executioner of its own population. If in former times martyrdom was the only form of suicide authorized by religions, today war seems to be the only form of homicide legitimized by democracies. Twenty-first-century Europe invites its young people to go to war. Why? Let the youngest answer this question—since I am interested only in what those compelled to fight in a war they have not provoked may say—but let them answer with words, not with their lives. Often, and though it may not seem so, courage is shown more through words than through deeds. Above all in a society where freedom of action is neutralized and freedom of speech is increasingly proscribed and curtailed, in the name of languages incompatible with the human rationalism of intelligent persons and, of course, incompatible with reality.

I insist bluntly that if the twenty-first century has taught us anything in its first twenty-five years of history, it is that the Enlightenment is the executioner of democracy, and that along this path democracy itself might paradoxically become the executioner of its population. Will that be one of the results of the invisible frontiers of globalization? Time will tell.

Jesús G. Maestro

Invisible Borders: The New Inequality in the Age of Globalization

  

An essay on the market, political decline,
and globalized misery

The image on the cover of this book was created by artificial intelligence and reflects what is there: the legacy that the boomers have left to a millennial generation.

A world in ruins, a democracy without a future, a predatory market, and an immaturity from which the young adult cannot make sense of the failure of childhood illusions, symbolized in a balloon as erect as it is broken.

It is the reality of post-democracy and its landscape: the globalization of the Anglosphere, the final stage of the Enlightenment and of its nihilistic and mercantile rationalism.

Cervantes Test and Don Quixote

The greatest psychiatrists in history have always been Spanish novelists and writers, from Cervantes to Leopoldo Alas, and above all Quevedo. Don Quixote, Dreams, and La Regenta do not allow us to lie. 

The best patients, in turn, have been foreign novelists and German philosophers, whose work likewise does not allow us to deny the truth of the historical calamities they set in motion—from the Reformers to the Enlightenment, from Kant to Nietzsche and from Freud to Heidegger. 

They are all on the couch of Spanish literature. Guess who is now in the waiting room.

Jesús G. Maestro

The Impostor Syndrome and the Failure of Happiness

 

The so-called impostor syndrome does not really exist. It is an invention of postmodern psychology. No cynic ever doubts his own success. Don Quixote is a prime example. He deceives others with his feigned madness, but he never deceives himself. He knows perfectly well, without leaving his chamber, that he must not repeat the test of the helmet in his initial preparations. Only those who deceive themselves, without deceiving others, doubt their own success, because it is others who deceive them, just as King Basilio deceived Segismundo, inducing him to doubt his own will and making him believe that life is a dream governed by a higher and immutable power. In this way, vulnerable human beings are turned into marionettes in a tragic puppet show under which freedom is proscribed and destroyed.

Those who doubt their own merits do so because others deceive them, and they suspect it, even if they do not dare to confess it to themselves, since they know and sense, not without reason, that they have a tail of straw. And for those who do not trust themselves, everything becomes doubts and fears and noises and appearances and phantoms. Those who do not know are afraid, until they learn, first, to legitimize their merits as their own work, and not as recognition bestowed by others, and second, to stand on their own and to know how to live emancipated from the praise of others, which is usually the true and only impostor: other people and their praise.

Those who claim to suffer from impostor syndrome are unhappy people with pretensions they cannot afford, and others, instead of warning them about their limitations, make them believe in imaginary virtues and powers that they completely lack. That supposed syndrome is nothing more than another artifice of the contemporary world, very maliciously promoted, whose aim is to preserve the narcissism of one’s own ego in the face of those who may suspect or sense that they suffer from it, so that they are neither able to avoid it nor willing to overcome it, and thus become increasingly narcissistic, until their irreversible and definitive failure. Far from preventing failure, the so-called impostor syndrome preserves it. The market wants you sick. And dependent on the perpetual pursuit of an impossible happiness.

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