We indulge ourselves because it’s Christmas. We spend money on others, but also on ourselves because any excuse is good to indulge. It is not a sin, as long as we are clear about the limits of our whims, not so much the material limits, the outlines of which are visible to us in the notifications of the bank’s application, like the moral ones, because of this understanding of the limits that morality imposes on us derives the civilized condition, that is to say, the possibility of living in society.
The other day, far-right alderman Javier Ortega Smith allowed himself the luxury of assaulting councilor Eduardo Fernández Rubiño in the plenary session of the Madrid City Council, with the rude manners of a schoolyard snack, like a child pampered who, as grandma would say, no one gave him a good kick in the ass in time. And such a shameful episode, it is not accidental but planned, it was a trend all weekend, clear.
The phrase we use for these occasional outbursts is important: “He allowed himself the luxury”. He gave himself this whim. Anger is a heritage of pre-civilized man, that is, of the barbarian and the child. Perhaps the most patent characteristic of the patriarchy’s defining masculinity is the supposed right to unleash uneducated anger, the right to bully around and, if necessary, slip into aggression and ‘murder As if the true condition of testosterone is that of reheated steam and the eventual violent episodes are a natural right to give it an outlet to avoid causing greater harm to the rest. It closes a year full of sexist murders driven by an anger to which the man of the species believes he has a right and which is planned from time immemorial even in the later phases of remorse and forgiveness, as predictable as they are 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 male rage that wants turn into an alpha gorilla right to readjust the hierarchies and put an end to that claim of equality for women and also for calm men. That’s why Javier Milei won the election: he didn’t win despite the visible bouts of irascible madness on TV sets, but because of them. That is why the most obvious expression of the Dark Enlightenment that threatens to return us to the pre-1789 superstition, the return to the uncivilized jungle, is to see the energumen lose their roles in the most shameful and premeditated way. The implicit promise is to return to a happy historical childhood that never existed and that at bottom only aims to make the power pyramid narrower again, in a world in which the hierarchs will be petulant children in the supermarket, bellowing like possessed as they stamp their feet on the floor of the candy aisle.
