Essay on the Historical Failure of Democracy in the 21st Century. Democratic Postmodernity as a Means of Destruction of Freedom and the Modern State, by Jesús G. Maestro
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When an allegedly intelligent person places the origin of modern rationalism in the Enlightenment, it tells us a lot about their education, thinking, and originality.
It tells us, above all, that they lack original thought and personal education. It tells us, above all, that they have no alternative to the conventionally received education, and that they have settled into it, uncritically and irresponsibly, as one might become entrenched in any kitsch, in an eternal hibernation.
It also tells us that they are incapable of perceiving, identifying, and even less so interpreting, the essential rationalism of the Modern Age, that is, the rationalism of the Baroque.
To equate reason with the Enlightenment is to graze in the barren field of the infertile seed of Anglo-Saxon idealism. In particular, the most sterile of all seeds, that of German idealism. And —with Rubén’s permission— it tells us, quite clearly, "we do not know where we are going, nor where we come from."
Those who explain Cervantes' rationalism through the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Romanticism have not lost their reason: they never had it. Nor do they know what reasoning is. Those who fail to realize that Quevedo is more rational than Rousseau are not just missing a summer: they are missing three decisive centuries of the Modern Age, including the Golden Age, of course.
This is the way of "thinking" of almost all of our intellectuals, philosophers, professors, and the rest of the clan. A broken record that has been playing and reciting the same message for over 300 years. The same nonsense. The Enlightened Eclipse.
The Scam of "Emotional Salary" and the Loss of All Private Property
The 21st century seems to impose, with subtle cunning, a concept of property very different from what we have historically known, at least until the 20th century. Today, it seems that the idea of private property has shifted from ownership to use or occupancy.
A home ceases to be the property of its owner and becomes the property of whoever occupies it... Perhaps whoever inhabits it. We can call it many things.
A text ceases to be the property of its author and becomes public domain, even against the conventional laws of intellectual property, which no one on the internet seems to follow, whether in the name of free culture or in the name of digital piracy... Most academic researchers and university professors publish their works openly, on multiple websites and repositories.
This is perceived as a form of self-promotion, avoiding the obstacle of payment for the potential reader. But in reality, it hides something unconfessable: no one would pay a cent to read what is written because it is worthless. Proof of this is the current agony of digital journalism. Intelligent people read the news more out of hope than curiosity. And they don’t pay for it because they believe the news isn't worth what it reports, and they don't need the emotions of pseudo-information since they have other options. I'm talking about intelligent people, don't get confused.
The academic world has renounced the ownership of rights in exchange for the narcissism of seeing themselves in a public space, which is, in reality, a library without readers or passersby. A dead-end alley. There are only idle onlookers and malicious gossipers. The new researchers. Intellectual property has vanished in the university.
How many people write, without signing their own name, what they contribute to global online encyclopedias and multiple websites? How many of our colleagues, out of sterile narcissism, renounce the ownership of their intellectual property, and even their own name and surname, replacing their identity with the most absolute anonymity?
The social and communicative relationships of the 21st century have destroyed the sense of ownership in all aspects of human life: social and political, scientific and ideological, communicative and literary, artistic and even oral.
Today it is possible to clone anyone's voice and image freely, with impunity, and for amusement. What is dangerous is not only not perceived as such, but is exhibited and promoted as funny and libertine. Fools always play with fire... in the haystack of their own life. Without knowing it. In short, today it can be said that no one is the owner of their own voice, their own face, or their own image, which anyone can usurp, use, and flaunt quickly and easily.
The impotence of laws and those responsible for them is absolute. And unprecedented in the history we live in and the one that awaits us.
A musical work ceases to belong to the composer and becomes the property of whoever performs it publicly.
Crisis and consumption, with all kinds of economic urgencies and needs, dictate the outcome.
In the United States, the country of capitalism par excellence, many people have always shared washing machines and laundries in their condominiums and residences. In many cases, under conditions similar to those of the failed Soviet Union. Such a thing was unmentionable for decades, but not for that reason untrue. It was and is undeniable.
Today, these practices have reached the heart and urban life of European cities, the continent of the supposed middle classes. Today, "coliving" is sold as a triumph of progress. Undoubtedly, it is a triumph of the progress of misery, of inescapable needs, and of the lowest human dependencies. Today, people in every neighborhood already share washing machines and laundries.
The most recent generations have to share apartments. By force, not by pleasure or devotion. Soon, they will also share rooms. And it won’t be for pleasure either. This always happened in convents, barracks, and hospitals—three places where life is never normal but rather isolated, belligerent, or sick. However, such a thing had not been generalized before, as it is today, as it is now, in everyday and normalized life. At least, it had not been generalized as a mandate of the "friends of commerce."
Because 21st-century life, designed by the United States for the entire global world, ceases to be private and becomes more public every day, not just because of the childish narcissism of social networks and the internet. It starts with sharing a washing machine and ends with sharing an apartment, a room, and a bed. A shared bed, yes, but not with a partner, but with the enemy. That is the future fate of the younger generation: to share their insomnia with the enemy. And pretend that such a thing is beautiful and happy. And therapeutic.
The payroll of workers will no longer have the known compensatory bonuses but will include jokes and memes. The meme has a happy name, and it's called "emotional salary." What is the content of this foolishness called "emotional salary"? The usual: creativity, volunteering, connectivity, proactive leadership, mobility, emotional intelligence... and whatever other nonsense the actor hired to promote it can think of.
Let’s not forget that volunteering is a form of slavery, consented to in the name of moral supremacism, whereby one works for free for a stranger. Something like the "God will reward you" of times past, but with more cynicism and humor. On the other hand, talking about emotional intelligence is the same as talking about emotional ignorance, that is, nothing and the opposite, because one and the other are the same, simultaneously. Mobility really hides the worker's shuffling, reduced to a puppet or a plaything of the international republic of money.
The boundaries between what is mine and what is yours blur, legally or illegally, and the differences between mine and yours disappear. Everything belongs to everyone because nothing belongs to anyone. And when something belongs to everyone, it’s because no one has anything. Enjoy the globalization of nihilism. But don’t expect me to believe it.
Ideologies have become the scam of democracies today. Originally, ideologies were synthetic responses to guild interests, primarily labor and economic concerns. Today, they are merely emotional and neurotic slogans. Sometimes, they are even psychotic imperatives.
Their purpose is not to solve problems but to preserve conflict and division, to deny shared experience.
Every ideology secretly harbors, covertly and, of course, obscurely, objectives that are contrary to the interests of the majority of the population—the very population that, ignorant of this, adheres to the promotion of these deceptive, restrictive ideologies.
Fear, lies, and guilt are part of the massive media spectacle. The magnetism of the abyss, that is, the greatest paradox of democracies: managing the emotional discord of the population through ideologies.
All current political debates and conflicts refer to a single question that no one dares to explicitly raise: is there really any interest in globalization in maintaining democracy? What use does the international market have for that group of states that only get in the way of the exclusive possession of a commercial monopoly foreign to all of them? The market does not want a division of powers. Today, the market only wants its own power. And it only negotiates with its own power.
Making private property impossible is not the same as prohibiting it: it is something much worse. It seductively uses the opposite procedure to prohibition to achieve the same goal: depriving human beings of freedom and autonomous survival. Antonio Escohotado referred to the latter as "communists," while Paolo Prodi labeled the former as "cheaters." Both represent different paths to the same destination: the totalitarianism of globalization. In short, these are the four essential forms of theft throughout history: robbery, deceit, corruption, and... the denial of private property.
Jesús G. Maestro
4 essential forms of theft throughout history: you won’t survive the last one
Democracy is a word that designates a system of government—nothing more, nothing less. Only when that system of government materializes and acts as such, that is, only when democracy acquires political content and realization, can we then say what type of democracy we are talking about and what the execution of that system of government called "democracy" consists of.
Every system of government among human beings, whether democratic or not, is a political system. Politics is the organization of power, meaning the administration of freedom, within a state, among the members of that state, and in relation to other states.
In our time, in most of the West, this organization of political power, this administration of freedom within the state and among other states, is called "democratic." But things are not just as they are named, and they are not merely a matter of language, philology, or linguistics. Things require more than just words for their understanding and use. And democracy is not merely a matter of words. Can democracy survive the disappearance of states throughout this 21st century?
In the West, the organization of the political power of the state, which we currently call "democracy," is influenced by a decisive content today that acts as a genuine solvent of democracy itself. This content is called postmodernity, and it also includes very specific and powerful components, which I will address below in this book, Essay on the Historical Failure of Democracy in the 21st Century. The contents of postmodernity are the main solvents and emulsifiers of so-called democratic systems of government. They are its cancer. In other words, the objectives of postmodernity are the main destabilizers of modern and democratic states, established since the European Renaissance, from the 15th and 16th centuries.
This is equivalent to stating that the permeability and tolerance that democracy shows towards postmodernity lead to the decomposition and destruction of modern and democratic states. Democracy, as a political framework, destroys itself by becoming saturated with anti-democratic content.
The process is slow but certain and irreversible because today, democracy, thanks to postmodernity, finds itself at a dead end from which nothing and no one will undoubtedly extract it—neither through the way it entered (as history does not allow for retracing steps; it is always irreversible) nor peacefully (as political changes are violent, even though violence is never, like Justice, the same for everyone).
Jesús G. Maestro
Is democracy currently in a maze or at a dead end?
According to the most authoritative literature on the history of commerce, economics, and law, the concept of "theft" in European civilization—and by analogy, Western civilization—has undergone three very compelling evolutionary and integrative stages: 1) theft in the strict sense, as the illegal appropriation of others' belongings; 2) deceit and fraud in counterfactual and commercial relationships, as a counterpoint to law and even to Commercial Law itself; and 3) political corruption and the adulteration of the rule of law through the transgression of civil and administrative laws, thanks to the supreme—and unchallenged—power of a global market and planetary capitalism.
Today, totalitarianism is not exercised by the state, but by the market. But this is not all. In fact, this is not even the essence of the issue. The important thing, perhaps because it is irreversible—and unremitting—is the following.
There is a fourth stage in the historical evolution of "theft." A fourth stage that not even Paolo Prodi, in his book on the seventh commandment and the sacred imperative, so categorical before Kant, "Thou shalt not steal"—Theft and the Market in Western History (2009)—comes to suspect, let alone intuit.
I refer, in my own terms and without ambiguity, to the denial of private property. I am not talking about Marxism. Marxism today—and for decades—has been a historical mirage, only visible from a chronic and perhaps incurable adolescence, still lingering in religious seminaries and faculties—lowercase—of philosophy or self-help. I am talking about globalization.
Today, the world is moving towards the denial of private property. It is the most sophisticated form of theft: preventing human beings from accessing essential resources, any resource that allows them to support themselves and own something with legal security and economic stability.
The occupation of housing—protected by law—the financial impossibility of acquiring it, the inability to access rentals for living, the limitation of individual or personal mobility through the use of one's own vehicle, or even the defense of one's own life—as essential and irreversible private property—are just some of the steps that foreshadow, as commercial vanguards, this global project and totalitarian objective: the denial of private property in all aspects of human life. Including one's own life, that is, personal biological survival. Or whatever remains of it. Because there will be no law to protect you, unless it is Commercial Law, whose objective is not to protect you, but the market that exploits you laborally and economically.
The goal and purpose of 21st-century globalization is to make it impossible for human beings to access private production of all types of goods, from the eradication of food sovereignty—they will not be able to grow anything of their own (the concentration of life in cities has been aiming for this outcome for decades)—to the inability to access any resource that could provide them with minimal autonomy or freedom.
Isolated in an urban area, their survival is and will be entirely vulnerable and easily overcome. However, they will be able to walk their dog and have access to a simulacrum of an urban "garden": they can play at asceticism and practice the narcissism of humility. And obey without alternatives or possible intelligence. They will feel a lot, and think of nothing, because for decades they have been educated to feel, not to think. They will feel, or not, happiness, but they will not think about their freedom.
The human being at the end of the 21st century will own nothing. And they will have no resources to own anything. It will not be denied by the state, as the state will no longer exist by then. It will be denied by global and borderless commerce.
The main resource deficit begins with an education that falls short of the demands of the life it must face and the reality against which it will have to fight. The fragility of healthcare resources comes immediately after or may even be simultaneous. The self-employed will become franchisees, and parasitism will be what it already is: a form of extreme and entirely dependent survival.
Today, there still exists a brief repertoire of generations that have made their lives a reality of private goods and that have had the opportunity—not all of whom have taken advantage of it with the same legality and fortune—of having forged their best or worst fortunes. They are the last generations that have fought, studied, and worked as the new ones no longer can, or perhaps do not know how to do. Because they have not been taught or encouraged to do so. Much less demanded.
The younger ones, authentic "Mowglis" or "children of the jungle" of the 21st century, use this verb—demand—as subjects, never as indirect objects. These descendants will pay more to receive the inheritance—if there is any, a very doubtful prospect, as their parents are not in the best position—than what that same inheritance is worth in cash. Many of these "Mowglis" will even be forced to renounce it due to lack of liquidity.
Keep in mind that fiscal oversight, like the payment of taxes—countless—is the legal way that democratic states, in the throes of their current political agony, use to appropriate—naturally in a way that is as legal as it is abusive—the personal production—and private property—of human beings.
If this is not "theft," use Orwell's dictionary (the Academy doesn't concern itself with such trifles). Idealism reigns in all cemeteries, and the elephant's cemetery is no exception. Also, be warned that Commercial Law is not a dictionary, but something that increasingly resembles an apagogé. The Internet, social networks, and mass media are already making sure to remind you daily that it is wise to come to globalization with the agenda well memorized.
Jesús G. Maestro
The Denial of Private Property in 21st Century Globalization
It is not commerce that needs democracy for its survival, as there has always been commerce before and after any democracy.
It is democracy that needs the state, for its survival and for the survival of democrats. Without democracy, there is commerce, but without the state, there is no democracy.
The future is marked by a market without a state, that is, by commerce without democracy. This is the core imperative of the new globalization.
Fear is a force that prevents human beings from becoming what they wish to be. It is the distance that separates your life from the goals and consequences you aim to achieve.
The power of this warlike impediment can be overcome in various ways.
One of them is gregarious fanaticism, which diverts fear towards the development of certain concealed and highly effective pathologies. This is usually the easy route for insecure and timid cowards who feel empowered.
Another way to overcome it is by using individual reason, which is much more difficult to develop than guild adhesion, and which requires much more courage, sustained strength, and extreme cunning and intelligence.
Humans almost always overcome fear, but not in all cases in a healthy and positive way. Sometimes it is deactivated with rational and effective operational strategies, but other times pathological strategies are developed that, ideally denying fear, turn the sufferer into a creature diverted from their original intentions and goals.
Fear derails life and ruins it. The gregarious exaltation of an ideal is always the strategic cover-up of a fear that is intended to be conjured or counteracted. Without success.
Feminism is the fear of suffering —without possible alternatives— the often idealized freedoms of men. The unconscious is —like collective and gregarious narcissism— the fear of the reasons, ideas, and customs of those who live differently —but closely— to us. The European Enlightenment of the 18th century is the fear of the power of Spain, of its history, its science, and its literature, which the Anglo-Saxon black legend discredited with a propagandistic force that even reaches our days.
Behind every exalted idealist there is a fear —underlying and buried— that has pathologically derailed and diverted the course of a failed intention, to which this idealism adheres blindly and without possible disenchantment.
Disenchantment requires overcoming the fear of accepting reality. Renouncing disenchantment is equivalent to perpetuating idealism and fear. It is the chronicling of a misguided life. Because fear —like fanaticism— makes you renounce life before error.
If democracy today enjoys the support of the friends of commerce, it is not because big capital is democratic, but because democracy offers them more consumers than any other political system. For now.
It is a matter of quantity. The day a totalitarianism offers them more consumers than democracy, the friends of commerce will support that—or any other—totalitarianism. It is not a matter of principles, but of consequences. The market wants consumers, not democrats. And the consequence is money, not democracy, much less principles.
Today, most consumers want to be democrats. Fine. The friends of commerce are fine with that.
When the majority of consumers identify with totalitarianism and are largely in favor of a totalitarian regime, the friends of commerce will be equally fine with that.
The friends of commerce have no prejudices, unlike the people who hate or detest them while simultaneously pursuing and feeding them. The friends of commerce have no prejudices or ideology: they have money. Ideology, like prejudices, is designed for you. For your usual diet and consumption. And for you to behave properly, playing at changing the world and all those little things.
Besides having money, the friends of commerce tend to reason much more and better than you. They possess a rationalism that their enemies too often and recklessly ignore.
The majority always wins. Reason comes, returns, and transforms afterward, again and again, adapting easily to whatever is needed. That's what the press and advertising, the law, philosophy, religion, and politics are for. Science is better off behind the scenes, circulating as a more or less well-kept secret. Literature... Literature is better called "creative writing," and like in today's United States, it should be one of those—naturally commercial—genres of self-help and self-deception. And everyone is happy, that is, content. It is better that Don Quixote remains an incomprehensible book for idealists.
The friends of commerce are not idealists. An idealist is someone who ignores how reality works.
When democracy becomes idealism, because in fact and in right it disappears from our real life, it is convenient to keep in mind that the distance separating idealism from totalitarianism is invisible.
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