The earth has never contemplated such a concentration of power: economic, propaganda, political. A billionaire and his multibillionaire feudal lords arrive tomorrow ready to eat the beautiful cake that the world has become, once the barriers of international norms, ethical norms or merely human norms have been overcome.
Everything has arrived as if by the leap of a horrible monster, we are upon it before we have had time to turn around.
Tomorrow, Monday, a time of unpredictable consequences will begin.
I was chatting the other day at a dinner with several people who considered that it wasn’t that big of a deal, that we had already survived a Trump season without noticing it much, beyond the obstacles for producers of olives and Iberian ham. Much ado about nothing, they said, asking to be served a little more wine and toasting the future.
Thus, historical changes usually overwhelm Europeans. It is a matter of reviewing the history of the 20th century. Nobody thought that anything would finally happen in 1914. The middle classes were doing their thing in the 1930s and the bourgeoisie and the upper classes never believed that the screaming German dwarf was a danger but rather a guy who would fight for them in the battle against the Bolsheviks. It is almost a continuation that history has trampled nations and their inhabitants. Specialty of the European house: internal fights, the most prosaic fights, cover a broader horizon that ends up looming over our heads.
It’s not even an ideological issue. As always happens, those who applaud and pay tribute are overwhelmed just like the rest, perhaps even sooner. Trump returns and, as he himself said one day, we must listen to him – like the terrible harangues of the last century who also announced everything to anyone who wanted to know – in his first term he held back, he departed from his initial ideas to become more conventional and everyone despised him, however, now that he returns sweeping and without hot towels, everyone wants to be his friends. It is one of the risks, those who believe that by surrendering the fastest vassalage they will have preferential treatment: Meloni, Orbán, Abascal. It will happen to them like everyone else, because their destiny cannot be different from that of the rest of the continent.
Trump returns, dominating like a king of the Middle Ages, surrounded by the feudal lords of money who have sworn to defend him and be loyal to him in exchange for power in their fiefdoms and being able to manage his own subjects. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg… if they wore long capes and thick gold rings on the hand that holds the swords, you would see them from afar. Instead, they battle without violence, they win by surrender, they have the power so that we, the servants of the people, are not only unaware of their dominion but that we surrender to them for mere pleasure, for comfort, for entertainment, for modernity, life, the soul, our secrets and our future. That’s where the book of chivalry mixes with one of Huxley’s. Avasallar comes from making vassals.
Everyone has their technological soma and no one suffers from the domination of their empires. What’s more, almost no one would be willing to give up what they consider to be the inalienable advantages that their fiefdoms offer. As if two decades ago we would not have lived so freely without them. The other lords, those who fight against them, send the illusion of being wealthy to millions of people in containers full of plastic objects, plastic clothing and, from time to time, a scorpion that sneaks between the folds. These compete for the crops of the century, the data, sometimes we even ignore the names of these dark lords, although Shein, AliExpress, Temu, WeChat, TikTok and Xiaomi, for example, are those of their fiefdoms, those that illegally transfer data personal data of its users to China.
So they are in their particular fight; they who have managed to accumulate fortunes more immense than Crassus ever had; They have their objectives, to achieve more money to never die or to escape the destruction they leave in their wake, which is why they do not consider their destiny linked to that of the rest of humanity, which has become a mine to obtain. resources. Those same resources that they use for the technological domination of the plebs, who will only be able to submit without any violence, anesthetized by the comfort they offer. To sustain it they need the new metals of the century, the rare earths, and if to achieve them they have to take over Greenland or subject Brazil or India to vassalage, then they will do so willingly. The mandarins are ahead of them, in their immense territory they accumulate 44 million tons compared to the 2.3 that the United States has on its soil. What can they care about global warming? They are incessantly watching for the melting of the polar ice caps and the Arctic Sea will be their next place of battle in the Risk in which they live.
The earth has never contemplated such a concentration of power: economic, propaganda, political. A billionaire and his multibillionaire feudal lords arrive tomorrow ready to eat the beautiful cake that the world has become, once the barriers of international norms, ethical norms or merely human norms have been overcome. We live in that small Gallic village that Europe has become. We were the center of the world and now the mortadella of a sandwich in which they have decided that we count for very little. How to defend ourselves against such a big challenge? How to save our imperfect but desired system of life, our democracy, our culture, our European Way of Life?
It has caught us off guard in our joyful life and envied by millions of people in hundreds of countries, who risk their lives to come to our dream. It catches us in low times, with petty leaders, with governments that fall or are about to fall, with polarized societies and the laxity typical of those who revel in their prosperity. The risk is common to all countries and all ideologies because for the new masters of the world we are all equally expendable. They are going to test even the states, which it is doubtful that they will be able to confront them, demonstrating that the dystopians who thought that corporations would rule the earth were more visionary than they seemed.
It will be a dictatorship without violence, a self-submission, a letting ourselves be done to live better, a voluntary surrender of everything that makes us human and thus we will be enslaved with our own acquiescence and our passionate applause. If everything perishes along the way, they already compete on their own to escape the disaster into space. His abandonment is not there but it is on its way. We should be debating whether we want to continue to stand up and confront them, if possible, if we can and how. They keep us entertained with the fragments of unreality that they serve to us from their servers and our leaders busy being the kings screaming in the chicken coops that they set up as a trap. It’s just a sketch. The norms of the world, its logic, are already substantially different from those we have known. The 21st century has awakened and Trump is only its emissary.
It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.
#doesnt #good
