As a psychoanalyst, Lola López Mondéjar (Molina de Segura, Murcia, 1958) has extensive clinical experience that, together with her humanist conviction, has served as an incentive to develop a solid career as a fiction narrator and essayist. After the wide impact of Invulnerables and invertebrates: Anthropological mutations of the contemporary subject (Anagrama, 2022), now returns with No story. Atrophy of narrative capacity and crisis of subjectivity (Anagrama, 2024), an essay that earned him the Anagrama Prize in this category.
No story constitutes a severe reflection on the effects that digital surveillance capitalism is having on our intelligence and our ability to think critically, but also on our mental health and our ability to heal it.
On a larger scale, López Móndejar’s book suggests that this same capitalism has destroyed the ideals of the Enlightenment that put the person at the center of the political debate, a person who runs the risk of ending up becoming a mere extension. of the technological devices that have colonized your life.
What led you to write this book?
No story part of the enormous perplexity I feel lately when observing how patients come to my office with a great inability to establish a link between the symptom, which is sometimes just generalized anxiety or panic attacks, and their biography. They can’t put that together, they aren’t able to explain why what happens to them happens to them. It’s not that they lack words, but rather the ability to use them and articulate the story.
And this, which is something that has always occurred in certain psychopathologies, such as psychosomatic disorders, suddenly began to see it spreading. When I asked other analysts if they observed the same thing as me – this impossibility of making an autobiographical narrative – the answer was overwhelmingly affirmative. From there, linking to my previous essay, Invulnerables and invertebrateswhere he talked in a chapter about “hollow men and women,” I realized that that was the problem.
How can it be explained?
Like a void that has been created in us, a lack of reflective depth, we could say, that depends on the social and production system in which we are inserted. And the worst thing is that the system proposes a way to fill that void that basically consists of canceling thought, which creates even more void. This is the premise that I have used for the work.
Do you think that this proposal to cancel thought is intentional on the part of the powers that be?
It is so on the part of post-Fordist capitalism and, exponentially, on the part of digital capitalism. That is to say, the large platforms are not innocent, their algorithms are not like this by chance, they know that they are subtracting thought and try to empty us to give us their proposals, which are usually consumer and very hollow entertainment that seeks to capture our attention.
The platforms know perfectly well that adolescents and people who spend more time in front of screens suffer from atrophy of thinking and a decrease in their capacity for critical thinking.
Are platforms like Facebook or X neutral and innocent instruments?
Of course they are not innocent at all and there are many testimonies of this. Arturo Béjar, the former Meta director who challenged Mark Zuckerberg, spoke in a Salvados program. He explained that the platforms know perfectly well that adolescents and people who spend more time in front of screens suffer from an atrophy of thinking and a decrease in their capacity for critical thinking, which therefore leads to a decrease in their narrative capacity. .
What do we understand by narrative capacity?
The narrative capacity is what allows us to explain the things that happen to us, explain ourselves and relate what happens to us. And this fits in with what I told you at the beginning regarding my clinical experience: there are more and more patients who do not know how to explain where the discomfort that has brought them to my consultation comes from. And without this explanation it is not possible to establish a causal relationship with the origin of the discomfort that allows it to be addressed efficiently.
The concept of “hollow men” features in a poem of the same name by TS Eliot from 1925…
The problem begins with the industrial era. Emptying is a process that is linked to the technological change that occurred at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, and that has now been accentuated by digital capitalism, which economically exploits our attention.
We intensely suffer the substitution of thought and knowledge by the consumption of information without contrast
And Ortega y Gasset also speaks in The rebellion of the masses of a new man who behaves like a mass that must be directed…
Now that man is guided from the outside with the universalization of screens. If we look closely, we are surrounded all day by screens that bombard us with information, which we absorb passively. We intensely suffer the replacement of thought and knowledge by the consumption of information without contrast.
And this substitution gives rise to men and women who allow themselves to be carried away by external proposals mimetically, in an uncritical way. This is what is known as “adhesive identities”. This would explain the adherence to certain extremist or denialist ideologies that incomprehensibly triumph today and are promoted from social networks.
Is the proliferation of these adhesive identities dangerous?
In adults yes. There is a mimetic desire in human beings, an impulse to imitate others, to copy their desires. This desire is fundamental, for example, for the first learning of young children. The point is that at this moment this emotional adhesion to the ideologies and theses of others occurs in young people and adults and in an increasingly majority way.
In this way, what was an ideal since the Renaissance and until the end of the 20th century, emerging from that childhood of humanity to create a society based on the enlightenment generated by knowledge and reason, has been dynamited and leads us to a completely new time.
Does this mean that we are facing the end of the era of Enlightenment?
Indeed, the digital revolution is bringing about the end of the era of Enlightenment ideals.
And perhaps man is ceasing to be the center of the universe and becoming a sheep in the flock?
To be a machine, we could say. In the book I talk about how we are becoming “psychic cyborgs”, with emotionality and reasoning directed from the outside by machines such as phones, tablets, computers, etc., which in turn are controlled by the large platforms of capitalism. digital surveillance.
We are becoming “psychic cyborgs”, with emotionality and reasoning directed from the outside by machines such as phones, tablets, computers, etc.
That is why, towards the end of the book, I talk about putting the human and the living, animals, back at the center of politics, but not money and technology. And right now we are in a process in which technology is at the center of the debate, and this is very dangerous, because it leads to dehumanization.
There is a decrease in empathy in the face of information bombardment and, furthermore, a hijacking of critical thinking, which is replaced by a desire not to think, because thinking is now synonymous with suffering. On the other hand, because of the acceleration that technological life offers us, we do not have time to generate notable experiences that mark our memory and, therefore, we have no possibility of making a story and we progressively become empty.
In the book you talk about the “precariat”, a term coined by the economist Guy Standing which refers to the chronic poverty to which many people are subject today.
Young people are subjected to enormous precariousness that condemns them to a life in which they feel they have no future. In such a way that they cannot establish a story about what their future will be and develop a thought about it. Today they are in a clothing store, tomorrow perhaps serving hamburgers… This is not how a vital narrative can be established.
What do they do then? Well, they drop out in many ways: they do not want to study or they take very rigid, regressive positions, with very firm positions that eliminate uncertainty. Because we leave them a legacy of a world with a lot of uncertainty.
Today young people are in a clothing store, tomorrow perhaps serving hamburgers… In this way, a vital narrative cannot be established.
I believe that, for example, the environmental crisis is something that young people are very aware of and are very distressed by. In schools, girls and boys are detected who are really bad due to eco-anxiety, adolescents who do not know how to act to stop climate change. In addition, we must add the terrible problem of homelessness… With what encouragement, with what motivation are these young people going to study or with what motivation are they going to engage in activism if they don’t see a future? The political disaffection or love for populism that we currently observe comes hand in hand with all this.
They are problems with complicated solutions…
It’s true. And part of the problem is that capitalism has devastated humanism, it has won the game by a landslide and our young people feel a helplessness learned from us, they believe that, whatever they do, it doesn’t matter: nothing will change. And, in fact, in recent times all the signs indicate this: first the war in Ukraine, then the Hamas attacks and the genocide in Gaza, and now Trump’s victory…
Finally: How do you assess Trump’s victory?
I value it as the triumph of ignorance. It is the end of Enlightenment ideals.
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