We treat ourselves because it's Christmas. We spend money on others, but also on ourselves because any excuse is good to pamper ourselves. It is not a sin, as long as we are clear about the limits of craving, not so much the material limits, whose outlines are made visible to us in the bank's application notifications, but rather the moral ones, because of that understanding of the limits that it imposes on us. Morality derives from the civilized condition, that is, the possibility of living in society.
The other day, the far-right councilor Javier Ortega Smith allowed himself the luxury of attacking councilor Eduardo Fernández Rubiño in the plenary session of the Madrid City Council, with the crude manners of a playground bully, of a spoiled child who, as his grandmother would say, no one He warmed up the ass in time with some good spankings. And such an embarrassing episode, not accidental but planned, was a trend all weekend, of course.
The periphrase we use for these botarate vents is important: “The luxury was allowed.” The whim was indulged. Anger is a heritage of the pre-civil man, that is, of the barbarian and the child. Perhaps the most obvious of the characteristics that define the virility of patriarchy is the supposed right to give vent to uneducated anger, the right to intimidate those around us and, if necessary, let it slide into aggression and murder. As if the true condition of testosterone were that of overheated steam and the eventual violent episodes were a natural right to release it to avoid greater evils by causing them to the rest. It closes a year full of sexist murders whose vehicle is an anger to which the male of the species believes he has the right and that has been patterned since time immemorial even in its later phases of remorse and forgiveness, as predictable as they are equally immoral.
The Western institutional right, perhaps disoriented by the collapse of neoliberal dogma, has appropriated all pre-enlightenment thought – nationalism, religion, war – and with it, also that deliberately uncontrolled masculine anger, which it wants to turn into a right. as an alpha gorilla to readjust the hierarchies and put an end to this pretension of equality of women and also of calm men. That is why Javier Milei won the elections: he did not triumph despite his visible outbursts of angry madness on television sets, but thanks to them.
Hence, the most obvious expression of the Dark Enlightenment that threatens us with a return to the deception prior to 1789, the return to the uncivil jungle, is to see the madmen lose their tempers in the most shameful and premeditated way. The implicit promise is to return to a happy historical childhood that never existed and that basically only aims to narrow the pyramid of power again, in a world in which the hierarchs will be infatuated children in the supermarket, bawling like possessed people while they stamp their feet in the supermarket. candy aisle floor.
