The idea that there are limits that cannot or should not be crossed provokes an instinctive rejection in our world: limits on behavior, on expression, on speed, on ambition, on consumption. At every moment, advertising offers unlimited advantages, unlimited enjoyment of data, unlimited pleasures, like in those low-class American restaurants that monstrously invite you to eat your fill for a fixed price: “All You Can Eat.” In this, as on so many other occasions, the most rapacious and destructive interests of capitalism are combined with the fantasies of radical emancipation and instant satisfaction of all desires inherited from May ’68. Capitalism wants to abolish any limits to growth and profit; he mayodelsesentayochismo encourages you to fulfill any desire at every moment and without delay or control: “Forbidden to prohibit.”
Unlike needs, whose catalog is quite small, desires can never end, and once obtained they awaken not the appeasement of what has already been achieved, but the anxiety of what one still does not have. That principle was formulated by Buddha 25 centuries ago and is now studied with all kinds of scientific resources by the inventors of addictions. Since imagination does have limits, those who achieve the privilege of owning everything, whether international drug lords or technology plutocrats, incur a painful monotony in their excessive acquisitions: luxury cars, mansions, watches, private islands, yachts, yachts. increasingly larger, yachts so large that they have to be accompanied by other yachts on which countless staff stay, yachts with helipads. Since not even the most enormous yacht is enough for them, rockets and spaceships are built; Because they are enraged by submitting to the humiliating limit of death, they found clinics and biomedical research centers to extend their lives. I read in Financial Times that, as a result of the covid pandemic, an increase in the acquisitive passion of mega-billionaires has been noted, perhaps urged by that shadow of mortality and transience of things that also afflicts us ordinary human beings.
On our own scale, each one can be like those hungry spirits that inhabit one of the hells of Tibetan Buddhist mythology: they have no peace because the food they devour instead of filling them up makes them even hungrier. It is amazing that such ancient wisdom contains metaphors that so precisely explain our times. Any limit is seen as an intolerable restriction. A poet rebels against the oppressive limits of meter and rhyme; an artist, against the dead weight of traditions and against the forms of academic art. That measured and rhymed poetry stopped being fashionable more than a century ago, and that all the academic traditions and conventions of art are no longer even a distant memory, do not diminish the arrogant conscience of those who at this point continue to declare themselves in rebellion. against them. Advertising has cleverly parasitized the language of the avant-garde: “Break the rules,” says a mobile phone advertisement. For several generations now there has been nothing left to transgress, neither in the arts nor in customs, but transgression continues to deserve all kinds of cultural and academic congratulations, and even subsidies, and the norm, the form, the limit, sound like tedium and repression. Economists have been mocking for decades the idea of the limits to growth formulated in 1972 by the Club of Rome.
A limit that among us suffers a particular form of contempt is that of manners, the formalities of social life, in the private and public. Among us, rudeness of behavior and speech is glorified as spontaneity, and all polite formality seems hypocrisy, and the coarser the language used by a writer, a journalist, a politician, a minister, the more impression it gives of authenticity and commitment. . In our disheveled youth we believed that the form was negligible because what was important was the substance, and that the content mattered and not the container, and thus we ended up in an ethical and aesthetic confusion that after so many years is very similar to what reigns now. same.
When everyone is young, the old English expression causes rejection. Manners before morals. Good manners, of course, are not more important than moral decency, but they are much more connected with it than it seems, and their deterioration and absence are signs not of emancipation, but of discord. A universal and implicit courtesy is practiced by almost everyone when moving through a subway network or traveling on the bus. Whoever breaks the limit of forms, speaking loudly on the phone, occupying two seats with his legs spread, causes stridency as unpleasant as that of a false note on a violin. When you have lived under the suffocating rules of a dictatorship, there is a natural instinct to rebel against all limits. But in our case the dictatorship ended almost half a century ago; and the Portuguese, who lived as subjugated as we do, and who also achieved freedom with an explosion of joy that we did not know, maintain an admirable respect for good manners, which is manifested at every moment in daily life, and also , to our shame and envy, in public life.
“Where there is form there is soul,” says Fernando Pessoa, who never found a possible form for the eternal draft of his Book of restlessness. Like those fathers and mothers who take so long to accept the educational value of limits, I believe that this relentless educator that is reality is teaching us all, in every area of life, the urgent need to accept them, and no longer as obstacles. inevitable, but as starting points for a rational improvement of things. Before our eyes the neoliberal and sixties delirium of the infinite proliferation of the capricious and the superfluous, of a non-stop economic growth that resembles the uncontrolled proliferation of a cancerous tumor, is being destroyed. Nothing can grow indefinitely: neither the number of tourists who come to a city or an island, nor the drinking water consumed in a country of desertification and drought, nor the plastic waste that is thrown into the sea, nor the quantities of food in good condition that ends up in the trash while millions of people continue to die of hunger, nor the bad and cheap clothes that someone wears once or twice or never wears and ends up in those mountain ranges of rags that grow in the desert of Atacama. A tenacious and courageous lawyer, Teresa Vicente, promoted the popular initiative thanks to which the rights not of a person, but of an irreplaceable gift of nature, the Mar Menor of Murcia, were recognized for the first time in Spain, an earthly paradise that It has been on the verge of becoming, due to waste and fertilizer dumping, a filthy swamp of stagnant water and dead fish. The just law promoted by Teresa Vicente marks the limits that ensure the protection of what belongs to everyone, to those who live now and those who have not yet been born, to human beings and other creatures.
But there will not be a law or even a great agreement that imposes the limits of good education, manners, prudence, to that part of the political and media class that only knows how to use language for harangues, lies and insult, to add fuel to the fire and celebrate with cynical mockery the fury of the flames.
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