I know that looking back, now that we have entered summer and most Barcelona residents avidly dream of stapling their towel in their favorite Empordà cove first thing in the morning to toast in the sun until it's time for rice, is an enormous drag. But it would be worth doing a small memory exercise and remembering how, during the outbreak of Covid-19 before the appearance of vaccines, while most scientists in the world sprinted to discover the miraculous liquid that was supposed to allow us to coexist with the little yellow bug from Wuhan, most of the tribe's epidemiologists told us that vaccination would be essential to reduce mortality in risk groups (mainly, the elderly who had died en masse in residences and hospitals due to lack of the infrastructures required by the first world, of which it turns out we are not a part), and that, in the absence of being able to get rid of the virus as if it were a horned animal or a runaway jihadist, we would reach the dreamed ideal when we could coexist with high doses of contagion but with low mortality, since what had to be avoided is that annoying and irreversible thing of ending up kicking the bucket.
Well, this is exactly the situation we are in: an environment where economic activity has incipiently resurrected –especially tourism and hospitality– with a logical and very normal surge in contagions among young people, because when one sends the kids to Mallorca to celebrate the sele... well, you don't have to be doctor and violinist Sherlock Holmes to guess that many of them will end up sharing saliva and other liquids (after a year locked up, they have acted saintly!); that is to say, as epidemiologists already warned, we would be in the controlled situation of coexistence with the virus without it having the bad habit of burying us underground.
However, and it is quite objectifiable, it is notorious how most mass media and also the political class, accustomed to fatalism and with a certain obsession with social control, has spent weeks speculating with new restrictions and using youth as a scapegoat for irresponsibility in contagion, as if our adolescents (who have responded massively to the vaccination campaign) had a special desire to live with the bug rampant in their blood.
Peter Sloterdijk says in Stress and Freedom (a book published by Arcadia and which this week of collective hysteria forces us to reread urgently) that our collective present could be described in terms of an allergy to calm. Let's read it in the beautiful translation from German written by our friend Raül Garrigasait: "The political macrocosms we call societies must be conceived primarily as fields of forces integrated by stress (...). From this point of view, a nation is a collectivity that manages to preserve the absence of calm in common. A constant, more or less intense, flow of stressful themes must be responsible for synchronizing consciences to integrate the population into a community of concerns that regenerates day after day."
If one reviews the newspaper headlines this week, it seems that everything adapts to the words of the German philosopher. Despite having managed to control the virus, journalists and politicians have daily taken it upon themselves to distance us from calm with what Sloterdijk brilliantly calls "new proposals for excitement."
Once distanced from the evil of the virus, I insist, society, addicted to alarm, has forced itself to experience new stress to live in exaltation. It was necessary, in short, to torture citizens with the daily grind according to which young Catalans are two, three, or who knows if thirty thousand times more infected than the rest of similar bipeds in civilized Europe. In fact, this very week we have been able to admire on the net the delirious experience of reading numerous complaints on Twitter from parents who, for a week, have subjected their children to four or five consecutive antigen tests within a few days, constant analyses that have not satisfied the spirit of the parents until, through almost military insistence, the children ended up getting infected. In fact, a situation of viral normality (I return to it; with the virus present but with no incidence) has ended in this delirious race to see who had more infections at home. "Haven't you been infected yet?" the ideological and communicative apparatuses of our pseudo-autonomy seemed to tell us: "Well, cheer up, if you try hard, you'll end up succeeding!"
Once distanced from the evil of the virus, I insist, society, addicted to alarm, has forced itself to experience new stress to live in exaltationThis that I tell you does not derive solely from an exercise in social philosophy because, after having seen how the regional administration kidnapped some young people in a hotel in Mallorca against the criteria of the community's own prosecutor's office, the most progressive government in history and the universe has taken advantage of the stress of the moment and the informational dispersion of the citizenry (the dread that has gripped us all was evident by simply glancing at the street, where people have put their masks back on in an apparently spontaneous way) to approve a practically Stalinist law that facilitates the administration's ability to requisition personal property from citizens, force them to perform social services in emergency cases, and even regulate industrial production in crisis situations.
The delirium of almost Caesarist control by the administration has also reached the filo-communist gang of the Barcelona city council, which has announced its noble intention to spray water on the city's squares and beaches to avoid crowds, treating citizens like a flock to be soaked from time to time so that they have the audacity to get off the street when it is not appropriate.
First, the social collective is stressed by creating a fictitious alarm that had previously been described as the ideal of normality to be achieved. Taking advantage of the artificial hysteria, mechanisms are triggered to infantilize citizens again and, incidentally, as if nothing happened, one promotes regulations with which the administration tells the citizen so calmly that, given that he is irresponsible, it will be she who will take charge of his freedom as if he were mentally retarded. Covid-19 has fostered this type of intolerable conduct of power and the more than foreseeable appearance of new viral crises has every appearance of facilitating a political environment where our individual freedom will be seriously and progressively attacked.
I know that the leitmotif of our publication, and praised be its anthropological optimism, is Good News, True Stories. Unfortunately, these true stories that I tell you are more than reliable, but they seem to be much worse than the effect of a virus. Let's prepare ourselves.
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