A long century after Ortega coined the concept (Like Adam in Paradise, 1910), adanismo has returned with renewed force. Indeed, much was said about him among us in the past decade, especially as a result of the appearance of some young leaders who burst into the public sphere with a radically regenerationist message, which sought, brandishing various reproaches, to make a clean slate of all the preceding and all those who starred in it.
If we had to draw in a single stroke (hopefully not too thick) the mental mechanism that all adanists share, whatever the field in which they develop their activity, we could use the one that I read somewhere, some time ago , which defined the adolescent: believing that he is inventing everything he discovers. Obviously, if his conviction were true, it would certainly not constitute a minor merit that would largely justify the reference to narcissism that appears in the title of this text. It is raised by Éric Sadin in his book The Era of the Tyrant Individual, specifically in its second part, dedicated to what he calls “the centrality of oneself”. It is clear that those who could put on the inordinate medal of having invented almost everything would be entitled to hold themselves in the highest regard. With the corollary that inescapably follows from this: they would be equally authorized to look down on those who, before them, had been incapable of achieving the same achievement.
This attitude has become so widespread that it has ended up becoming the daily bread. Are you against the proposal that I have just made? It is aligned, automatically and without any nuance, with those who are supposed to live anchored in the nostalgia of a remote past in which all the problems that concern us today remained pending to be resolved. As if there had not been others who, not so long ago (sometimes even recently), carried out reforms or changes on the same subject and in the same sense, only with differential nuances but which, in no way, questioned a deeply in tune with what may now be being proposed and demonstrate a similar willingness to solve the problem in question.
But our Adamists are reluctant to accept such evidence. They need, in order not to ruin their narcissism, to think of the past in terms of almost utter theoretical destitution and utter practical desolation. A complete sample of this type of reproach can be found in the collective volume Neorrancios. Of course, the reproaches are not always drawn in a simplistic way. Sometimes the aforementioned adanistas seem willing to recognize some minor merit in the preceding, but in no way comparable with the value of the proposal that they are presently proposing. In this, they also remind those pre-adolescents who, having just discovered sex and faced with the evidence – of which they are living testimony – that their parents also practiced it, decide to maintain, with absolute seriousness, that it was only on one occasion and for engender precisely them.
Let us accept that, on a personal level, excessive audacity, insolent audacity and, more generally, taking the world by storm, so characteristic of youth, may be mechanisms that nature, intelligent, has endowed with. who embark on their adult life trajectory to prevent a truthful anticipation of the future that foreseeably awaits them from causing them to fall into a deep and despondent disappointment. (A disappointment that, by the way, Eudald Espluga faces decisively in his book Don't be yourself, significantly subtitled Notes on a fatigued generation).
Indeed, acknowledging the authority of the wise implies assuming the enormous effort that is required, the great height of the mountain that must be scaled, to catch up with him. Faced with this, nothing is easier than the blind narcissism of the young student who, after just a couple of readings, believes he is in a position to question and unmask the old professor that he has spent his whole life investigating. Or that of the budding writer who, with nothing yet published, disdains, due to being impure, commercial or repetitive, the success of the author with hundreds of pages behind him and thousands of readers to his credit. Or that of the young opinion-maker who attributes the attention that more veteran thinkers can obtain to a presumed position of editorial, political or any other order of power and not to the interest that the ideas they hold may arouse in many people. Undoubtedly, this type of attitude has been strengthened by the unstoppable expansion of social networks, which have ended up generalizing attitudes that in the past received less echo, a generalization accurately described by Byung-Chul Han in his brief Infocracy. Probably the epitome of such attitudes is represented by the troll, that uninhibited figure capable of establishing himself as the interlocutor of whoever he wants and making the figure fall from a donkey, from the comfort provided by his anonymity and without the slightest embarrassment. most prestigious in any field.
It would not make sense, at this point, to pretend to be scandalized by such behavior. In the same way that it is not possible to be deceived in this regard: most likely many of those criticized today incurred, years ago, in relation to their predecessors, in attitudes similar to those that we are commenting on now. But the fact that the thing comes from a long way, even that it has a lot of recurrence, does not exempt from the need to submit said attitudes to scrutiny, pointing out their inconsistencies and contradictions. Among other reasons, because the Adamism of our days is having a role far superior to any of the precedents, since it has come to occupy the territory once occupied by some discourses that have been beating retreat for a long time, like all the great pre-existing visions of the world, for which reason it is hardly being the object of any challenge. Armando Zerolo, in his work Time of Idiots, has sharply mapped this radically lacking dimension of our time.
In this sense, we have been witnessing what could well be called a low-intensity cancellation, in which any approach that questions, however timidly, the proposals of our new Adamists is rejected by them with arguments as excessive as they are resounding, which they align with the most retarded reaction to anyone who dares to confront them and, therefore, authorize their immediate expulsion from public debate. Without powerful referents with which to debate, it would seem that these newcomers have been losing the skill of debating ideas, which they have been substituting for simple anathema and irreversible exclusion. It is not otherwise how they use the suffix -fobo, namely, as an attribution of intentions to the adversary, which, in addition, have previously been disqualified as deserving of a hate crime or any other reproach of similar tenor and large caliber. Thus, only in the field of sexuality -although the same could be predicated of other fields- there is a wide range of terms that fulfill the aforementioned function: homophobe, lesbophobe, transphobe, biphobe..., all of which can be included in the generic LGTBIphobic , as the psychologists José Errasti and Marino Pérez Álvarez have pointed out in their controversial book Nobody is born in a wrong body. Direct consequence of such disqualification? Very simple: there is nothing to talk about with someone who has been able to deserve one of these forceful qualifiers. The final outcome of the journey is that the public debate is thus silenced and the slightest possibility of a clarifying confrontation of ideas and points of view vanishes.
It will be noticed that we are not alluding to the justice of certain causes but to the way in which the proposals that supposedly defend them or the claims that seek to materialize them are argued. But the pluralism that some insist on restricting cannot be understood as a graceful concession on the part of those who believe they are in possession of the truth (or have a monopoly on the defense of the good, which does not matter from the perspective of what is is raising) to those who are wrong, but is rooted in the conviction of the fragility of our knowledge, to the extent that it recognizes that in certain areas the same problem can in principle accept different solutions.
It will hardly be necessary to underline then the harmful effect that the attitudes that we have been commenting have on the proper functioning of democracy. An effect that Francis Fukuyama has observed, not without some concern, in his recent Liberalism and its Disenchanted. Although perhaps everything is substantiated in that to be consistently a democrat a certain degree of humility is essential. The humility of those who, from the very beginning, are willing to admit that perhaps it is the other, the one who disagrees with one, the one who is right, the one who best knows what objectives are worth fighting for and what are the best ways to achieve them. . Although, when you think about it, it might be asking too much of someone who, like a new Adam, is convinced that "everything started with me."
Manuel Cruz is a professor of Philosophy and former president of the Senate. He author of The Great Blackout. The eclipse of reason in today's world (Galaxy Gutenberg)
