Until relatively recently, what fascinated both princes and the masses was the exotic. The traffic of objects and flora and fauna brought from distant countries was going from strength to strength. Ladies and hunters adorned their headdresses with showy tropical bird feathers, without of course wondering under what conditions they had been obtained; Tamed beasts were exhibited in circuses and the market for strange, never-seen dried animals was great.
The popular displays of overseas wonders included, of course, human beings. The paterfamilias took without thinking twice to his entire family to see exposed black men and women! half-naked, pygmies, Indians of the great American plains, Eskimos and, in short, any child of God who at that time considered himself savage. The suffering suffered by these supposedly exotic beings exposed to public scrutiny is infinite.
But the eagerness to do business of the entrepreneurs of the exotic meant that, in the face of growing popular demand, they ended up offering pig in a poke in their shows. Needless to say, the respectable did not take long to realize the deception. As a consequence, there was a sudden change in tastes: the fake exotic was replaced by the authentic, which, of course, would also end up in another monumental fake.
The day came when stories of the adventures undertaken by intrepid white explorers through inaccessible distant lands ceased to be of interest. The void that these left was filled by urban stories starring detectives, policemen and thugs. Suddenly the crimes committed around the corner were worth more than the misdeeds of cowboys or Apaches.
A glance at the menu of online platforms like Netflix is enough to verify that we are still prisoners of the fascination that crime, violence, greed and, in short, everything abject of the human being exerts on us. Of course, it is done with an amazing refinement of resources and techniques, which usually give priority to action over words, to feelings over ideas. But that does not remove the monotony of the contents. Tired of so many stories of serial crimes, impossible robberies, endless wars, the CIA or the FBI, an extreme that pushes producers to falsify, to cheat, to offer cat for free. So much so that now what is sweeping is the false. As is, without hesitation or explanation.
The same is true in art, literature, film, cooking, fashion and, alas, the media. Since we have long since become accustomed to a diet of catastrophes and misfortunes of all kinds, after so many video games and television news at dinner time full of violence and blood, those who are in charge of entertaining us are going crazy looking for new ways to surprise us. It is a fight to the death in which anything goes in order to gain the largest audience share possible.
It is what has led to the rise of the false, the hoaxes, the fake news. And all things considered, this fateful phenomenon is what helps us understand the often misunderstood concept of the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt arrived at during the trial of a Nazi criminal in Jerusalem.
It has taken us very little time to let the war in Ukraine matter much to us, because the sun is shining and life without a mask invites us to think of happier things. We are satisfied with the images of a new shooting in the United States, which we will later see versioned, increased and falsified in a movie or series.
The bad thing about so much runaway technological progress is that it has created an insatiable monster that if it has not yet devoured us, it is because it has trivialized everything it touches in such a way that we no longer give a damn about human dignity or what should dignify the arts and the sciences, and which, in the past, we longed to reach and preserve by all means. The exotic, the authentic is now reduced to finding a facade free of horrendous graffiti; a politician who does not spew lies; a landscape without litter; a series that is not an insufferable rehash; a war that we really care about, and not just because it might leave us without heat for a while next winter.
While we dedicate ourselves to taking selfies, globalization trivializes everything in its path. We suspect that something very big is going to happen, without knowing exactly when or what. So, just in case, we instinctively seek refuge in the morass of banality that some call progressive and others conservative. Little tease.
