There are those who have defined our current society as a society of hate, so widespread is this feeling among individuals. The definition is substantially correct, but perhaps it refers to the final phase of an evolution or drift that goes through previous moments, also worthy of attention if we want to adequately understand the outcome we are witnessing. Well, if that is what it is about, perhaps one of the moments that is most appropriate to highlight is what we could well call the moment of widespread ingratitude.
Illustrative examples of how widespread this attitude is are everywhere. For some time now, it seems that many people have become inclined to make, especially when celebrating some success, a kind of autobiographical declaration of principles that seems to be aimed at highlighting the value of their own merits. The terms of the declaration are almost always the same: “I don’t owe anyone anything.” This statement seems to have become so widespread that we have reached a point where we easily take it for granted, without noticing the assumptions – some of them completely fallacious – that it contains.
And although the generic “nobody” in the declaration does not point to any particular “nobody,” it often refers, more or less explicitly, to those whom a third party might consider to be the true responsible for the fortune that the declarant in question claims as a result of his or her own merits alone, but which from the outside someone might think could not have been produced without the assistance or help of people who, for example, provided him or her with the means or opportunity to assert such merits. Frequently—though not always or necessarily—the link between the two sectors is posed in openly generational terms. When this happens, the result is that it is the members of the younger generations who refuse to accept the existence of any kind of debt to members of the preceding generations.
It should be said, as a preliminary consideration, that the existence of someone who owes absolutely nothing to anyone is almost an ontological impossibility. Social life and the consequent interaction between individuals and groups implies, in a way that is almost inevitable, both the realization and the reception of behaviors that are difficult to reduce to mere particular interest or, if you prefer, that are not adequately understood if we analyze them exclusively in terms of cost-benefit calculation or similar (even though there are always people who, with manifest semantic impropriety, use expressions like “he owes me a favor,” as odious as they are self-contradictory —a favor by definition is given as a gift, without expecting anything in return).
In any case, what makes this resistance to assuming the smallest debt relevant and significant is precisely that it occurs in very diverse spheres. Without going any further, in the intellectual and, more specifically, in the academic, where the old statement “we are a generation without teachers” has lost the status of lament – or even complaint – that it had in its origins to become an alleged description not exempt from a certain vindictive charge. To the point that it is not only that the concept of teacher as such is rejected (and let alone that of disciple), but that the nature of the very link that is established in the transmission of knowledge is called into question.
There are undoubtedly several factors of a heterogeneous nature that have influenced this result. It seems clear, for example, that the questioning that the idea of authority has been undergoing for some time now explains a good part of the reticence mentioned. In the same way, we must not rule out that this may be due to a defensive reflex on the part of those who fear that, in comparison with their predecessors, those who have succeeded them may come off badly. But neither is the idea of authority an idea that we can do without without serious theoretical consequences (of unintelligibility), nor should recognizing, especially in the field of intellectual activity, how much we have all learned from those who preceded us mean the slightest disgrace.
Perhaps we should look elsewhere for the causal factor that best explains this widespread tendency towards ingratitude. Specifically, we should look for it in the very evolution that our society has followed in the direction of a growing and almost exasperated competitiveness, supported in turn by a fierce individualism. In this context of a reality governed by the logic of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest, gratitude is no longer a useless anomaly: it challenges this logic head-on, to the point that, precisely for this reason, we could come to consider that it goes against the grain of the world. Nothing brings less benefit than giving thanks. Perhaps that is why giving thanks makes us better and helps us to make those with whom we interact better.
#society #ingrates
