The tragedy experienced by Morocco this weekend has served to bring to the surface a masked, digital and mostly Cajetan racism that has caused consternation even in ideological territories that have openly flirted with it in recent years, but that assume that, in the face of devastation like that experienced in the neighboring country, civility requires at least apparent solidarity and mourning. After all, decorum is not a function of sincerity but of civilization.
The concern about the possibility of incubating a return of 18th century racist hordes must be real but it is worth remembering that the filter of the mechanical interface must be applied. The long decade that important sectors of the reactionary right have been haranguing their subjects with the message that democracy has forced them to mitigate their true postulates and that it is necessary to rectify these "complexes", that is, replace respect with relief, civilization with impudence, has had effect. Now, infamous reactions like the one seen before the earthquake in Morocco, unthinkable a few years ago, when the democratic conservatives still had arguments of political competition and had control over their parties, are common.
But before addressing the problem, it must be given its correct dimension by applying the aforementioned interface filter. We can also call it the impunity of the masked man, although the above signatory prefers the barking of the fence. All those rude and slanderous judgments are made from the other side of a screen. Here we have often talked about the many viral videos of dogs barking as if they were going to eat each other from opposite sides of a fence or gate and suddenly calming down and wagging their tails if they discover that the boundary is open or has a clear step that would allow them to turn their roars into bites. The fence is the screen, a parapet that allows expression with a primary and uncivil crudeness, and does not correspond to the behavior we would have if there were no apparatus. And the distasteful digital behavior is no more sincere than the polite one in the flesh, just as the wild barking is no more true than the gentle waving of the tail.
We did not have to wait for the digital agora to learn about this tribal regression. Most of us are more irritable and less friendly when we interact with our peers from behind the wheel. We would make way at a door to the same human that we rush to avoid yielding to at a roundabout. And if our behavior is modeled on that of other higher mammals, it means that it does not have, no matter how hard we try, origins in civilization or culture, but in the remote mists of time, when we communicated with grunts and fussing. Here is a singular paradox: the machine makes us primitive, advances our chin and ciliary arch and sinks our eyes and intelligence.
