In 2006, the thinker, writer and philosophy professor José Antonio Marina (Toledo, 84 years old) published “Anatomy of Fear”. A treatise on courage in which he established a complete genealogy of the “great family of fear, unrest, terror and vulnerability” and wrote a hymn to courage as a starting point for a new definition of human nature. Just two months ago, writer and literary theory graduate Andrea Genovart (Barcelona, 30 years old) won the Llibres Anagrama Novel Prize 2023 with Consum Preferent in his crazy Spanish-Catalan-French-English-and-etc. ). .), and which, beyond a funny stylistic bombshell, represents a bitter and satirical portrait of his generation: the generation between the economic crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. To discuss fears, bravery, doubts, conformisms, skepticism, cowardice and anger , which refers to the present and the future, we invited both to sit opposite each other in the Ateneo de Madrid.
Climate fear, fear of work, fear of not belonging, fear of the machine, fear of artificial intelligence, fear of polarization, fear of extremism, fear of another pandemic, fear of terrorism, fear of war, fear of loved ones being in danger , fear of God, even just fear, this inexplicable fear. We're surrounded, aren't we? As always or more than ever?
Jose Antonio Marina. One of humanity's most constant feelings is fear. He was a great social organizer, so he was always given power; One of the methods he had to use to prevail was fear. Machiavelli assumes that people can be controlled by either love or fear, and that it would actually be better to do so through love, but that this is very difficult. And fear is more effective. But Andrea, I wanted to tell you something. I don't know if the new generations, who should logically be very afraid of uncertainty today, have somehow gotten used to it because in reality they don't expect much. What do you think?
Andrea Genovart. Yes, I believe that the uncertainty has actually assimilated to the point of being unable to project anything. And that is completely paralyzing. Fear often acts as a political driving force. And I believe that we are now in a moment where anxiety is combined with depression. One of the evils of our time is that fears used to be perhaps more concrete – a war, an illness… – but now I feel that some of them have no meaning, for example… fear of the future. Liquid and amorphous fears. Or the fear of climate change, which is like imagining an apocalypse. In my generation there is an unidentifiable fear, something that flows through you, that has no object but represents a state.
JAM I think you're right, Andrea. So if we do a phenomenology of fear, fear is the awareness that danger has occurred. It is a very basic feeling, a feeling like fear. If the danger is concrete and definable, then it is fear. If you can't do it, but you're still afraid, it's technically anxiety.
AG Wouldn't it be contradictory by definition to speak of fear of the future, since the future cannot be defined? Shouldn’t we call it “fear” instead?
JAM And uncertainty. Uncertainty consists in the fact that the information we have is so huge that rather than limiting uncertainty, it increases it. And another thing is ambiguity, that is, the difficulty of understanding what is happening. And that feeling of saying, “I don't understand what's happening,” I think has led to something that worries me in the younger generation, which is to say, “Look, I don't understand it, and maybe it is.” That's not “that important”. There is a kind of decline in the need to understand things. And that seems dangerous to me. The character in your novel represents something like that.
AG One thing that is very important to our generation and that makes us have a lot of skepticism and therefore a cynicism that makes us think that it is pointless to learn, to politicize ourselves or something like that, is the downfall of the capitalist dream to experience the promise of effort, of class rotation. I don't think there's much scope for what progress is, or that progress is something you can decide on, and that leads to getting caught up in the thing of inertia that you mentioned.
JAM My former students, those who are around your age, Andrea, have settled into something that seems sad to me, a kind of helplessness, but a pleasant helplessness. There's no hope for the future… but hey, I'm fine on the weekends now. It's actually a kind of accepted frustration.
There are quite a few 30-year-olds who are happy because they don't lack work, but they can't last long anywhere. They tell them that they work well, but it is impossible for them to stay long.
AG There are structures that are simple and very precarious. In four years I had to change apartments four times, with all the emotional stress that entailed. There is a work logic based on fixed-term contracts. And all this, not to mention the problem of the sexual emotional relationship, all as fluidly as possible and through applications. I'm not justifying this, nor do I think any of it will lead to a good outcome, but I can understand that ultimately the only leeway young people have today is knowing whether to drink a beer or not. whether they spend the money on dinner or not. .
JAM So there is more than a feeling of fear about the future, there is a feeling of acceptance of the temporary.
AG Yes, uprooting.
JAM Man, I think that saves a lot of people from depression, but in another sense I think we have very few rebellious young people. And something even worse: young people are beginning to despise freedom. In other words, “Well, freedom isn't that important, at least as long as some sort of direct freedom of choice is preserved.” You're free? “Yes, because I have 10 brands of beer to choose from in the supermarket.” But look, you don’t have the freedom to go to the supermarket or not. It's a kind of limited freedom. And that, in my opinion, is one of the reasons that leads to a turn to illiberal democracies.
December 5th, 2023 – Conversation between José Antonio Marina and Andrea Jenovart at the Ateneo de Madrid – ©Ximena and Sergio —-PIEFOTO—- Andrea Genovart has just won the Llibres Anagram Prize with her novel Consumir Preferentemente. José Antonio Marina examined the different modalities of fear in his 2006 book Anatomy of Fear. Ximena and Sergio
In a way, this clashes with something that is also reflected in Andrea Genovart's book and that you, in Anatomy of fearalso reflected, quoted Karen Horney and his concept of the “tyranny of self-demand.” This conformism collides with the stress of “I have to”, “people expect me”…
AG Let's see, I believe that our generation is currently at a crossroads of brutal polarities: I believe that a generation has never felt so free to be such a slave, because yes, they feel very free in a sexual sense Freedom, participation movements in social and alternative media, but at the same time you are a super slave to the capitalist dynamic, which in my opinion is more solid than ever, and you are in danger of thinking yourself free.
Our generation finds itself at a crossroads of brutal polarities: I believe that a generation has never felt so free and at the same time been such a slave” (Andrea Genovart)
JAM A lot of things in the area of new technologies happen in the context of lack of freedom. And one of those pivotal moments that went almost unnoticed and had a huge impact was when Facebook introduced Likes into its programs. I mean, I'll give you a small prize every time. We all get little prizes all the time, and that makes us addicted to new technologies.
The narcissistic element to understand us.
AG This element creates a real dependence on your self-image. There comes a time when one must exist for the other. It's terrible that when a person logs out of social networks, for example, it's as if they no longer exist in the other's mind.
A young woman reads the book “Consum Preferent” by the writer Andrea Genovart. Albert García
Says the French psychiatrist and essayist Marie-France Hirigoyen, Author of books like The new solitudes, the moral harassment or the daffodils have taken over, that what matters is no longer what you are, but what you imply that you are…
JAM This is a current fear!
AG The thing is that existence is now virtual, a simulation, as Baudrillard said. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to stay on top of, project, and know what the other person is projecting through digital code alone. This time is already greater than what we spend on empirical and physical experiences.
JAM What is happening, and this is scary, is that we are getting used to consuming only short messages. These short forms of expression are suitable for an advertising slogan, for a slogan, for a meme, for an insult, but not for an argument. The arguments require long texts. But we are in a kind of social – and political – communication in which no time is wasted on arguments.
AG This is what you can see on Twitter: 240 characters to express important concepts and things from political figures or talk about climate change, I don't know…
Tweets are sometimes like the beginning of a book: someone throws up because something feels bad.
AG Complete! It's like a bit of bulimia. This means that the recipient is not prepared to understand a cognitive process with all its time-consuming and complex consequences. He doesn't need much from the receiver anymore; on the contrary, it bores him.
The philosopher, professor and writer from Toledo, photographed in Madrid. Santi Burgos
JAM When I teach courses for graduate students in philosophy, I ask them a question that is a test of urgency: “Do you think all opinions are respectable?” And everyone tells me yes. And I tell them that they are confused. One thing is the right of all people to say that their opinions are respectable, and another that this is so, because the content of these opinions can be stupid, offensive, slanderous, terroristic… or nonsense like the claim that Earth is flat. And I told this at an event I was invited to in A Coruña and it was kind of crazy, they posted it on Instagram and I don't know where else, it was a trending topic… but it's somewhat obvious! How can you be surprised? The people of it? We find ourselves in a superficial polyphony. In the end, all votes have the same value.
The current level of education in critical thinking, expression, conversational learning, dissertation and disciplines that exist in other countries is a cause for concern. What do you think?
JAM Currently, the world is in a state of education alert. We say that 60% of the jobs in which boys and girls who are already in school go to work have not yet been invented. And if we don't know what they'll be working on, what conceptual systems they'll be thinking with, what tools they'll be working with, and what problems they'll face, then what the hell are we teaching? Pedagogical thinking is the same as philosophical thinking: at least. Furthermore, we are in the attention economy. Managing political behavior is not as important as managing attention. The CEO of Netflix said it before: “If we have a problem, it's the fact that people need sleep; Because if you have to sleep, you can't get by with screens.” Attention is the scarce commodity. And critical thinking, same thing. It is a serious problem that critical thinking is being discredited at elite universities in the United States. It is very strong: many students demand from the rectors that the university should not introduce ideas that could worry them. This is serious, but the fact that the principals agree is terrible. And something else terrible happens. Today we belong to different tribes, which destroys the idea of universality. Every tribe has its idea. And so the woke thought says, “Look, I'm a black thought, or a queer thought, or a trans thought, and I'm not the least bit interested in explaining it to you, because I'm not interested in that You understand me.” This is the truth of my group and I don’t care about the truth of your group.
AG Well, for me there is no problem with banishing the idea of universal truth. We could organize ourselves knowing that there are none and of course respecting certain minimum requirements.
JAM But Andrea, if you ignore the idea of universality, plurality as such is worthless, because within plurality there can be Nazis. And if you abandon the concept of universal truth, there is no point in saying that all men and women are equal. Ignoring the universal truth, Trump comes along and tells the farmers of Ohio that climate change is a lie from some gentlemen from the East. Denying the possibility of universally acceptable truths is more serious than it seems. But I want to go back to the concept of comfortable helplessness that we talked about before… Both Yuval Noah Harari and Francis Fukuyama say that we focus on the idea of a kind of comfortable happiness, a happiness without great expectations: comfort, Well-being…, and that brings us…
AG… But who defines what comfort is? Because when the demands of people of my generation are criticized, I often see that they make us feel like the maximum and the minimum. If you ask for a more worthy job, you will be told that at least you have a job. In other words, be grateful that you are alive and that's it. We are infantilized, it is made clear to us that we are just whiners or egomaniacs.
Marina and Genovart, in different moments of their conversation. Ximena and Sergio
Spain has youth unemployment at 30% and since 2008 young people's purchasing power has fallen by 23% [Instituto Nacional de la Juventud]. What response mechanisms has this generation put in place, caught between the economic crisis of 2008 and the pandemic crisis of 2020?
AG Well, it seems to me that the response mechanism we have – and I'm not defending it – is the idea of evasion and increased consumption, especially in the technological area. These mechanisms are severely affected by information overload, which includes such a large amount of information that it leads us to paralysis due to skepticism or cynicism. For example, for many people there is no longer a right-wing party or a left-wing party because politics is inherently corrupt.
It may happen that the next step in this demobilization is withdrawal and from there the famous – and terrifying – Idiots AristotelianNO?
AG Or psychopathy or sociopathy…
JAM There is one thing that sounds very bad, but at the moment psychological happiness is fashionable. And that seems like a social catastrophe to me. It's a kind of contented state of mind in which I don't seriously miss anything and would like to maintain it forever. Everyone looks for it as best they can. But then there is something else that essentially comes from the French Revolution, and that is political happiness, public happiness. It is an objective situation and no longer a state of mind in which I believe that my happiness projects are protected.
AG We are infantilized by politics: that we have to be rebels, that we have to complain, that we had everything. But 15 years have passed since the 2008 crisis and it is logical that there is skepticism.
JAM Complaining about something is not a problem. It is important to identify the problem well before trying to solve it. And if politicians, who should theoretically solve the problems, seem to people to be the big problem, then what world do we live in? My new book, which I'll be publishing in a few months, is called Universal History of Solutions and is a counter-current book that deals a little with all of this…
AG For me there is one essential thing. To establish a roadmap, which is not the case in our country, all cards would have to be put on the table, and what has been shown over the last decades is that it is a state that has falsified, lied, damaged
It's one thing to be afraid – which can be an advantage – and another to be a coward. The coward does not enter the field of emotions, but the field of behavior” (José Antonio Marina)
We started talking about fear, and we could end up talking about fearful and courageous. Is fear bad or can it be a warning to courageous people who are willing to accept it and thus recognize the dangers?
JAM Fear is one of the basic emotions and occurs in all animal species with a structured nervous system. Like all emotions, it is a kind of GPS of behavior and, like all emotions, helps us to make decisions very quickly and implement mechanisms that save us. But it's one thing to be afraid – which can be an advantage – and another to be a coward. The coward no longer enters the field of emotions but of behavior.
AG Fear has very useful things, also socially: the fear of terrorism or any kind of totalitarianism. But I think we are in a moment where fear is out of control because we are already catastrophizing and not fearful. I think we need to regulate it a little, out of courage and optimism.
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