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
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
