“We live in a social psychosis that is an experience of existential emptiness, anonymous insubstantiality, and violence.” (M. Recalcati – Vacuum Clinic)
The ongoing trial in Gesell on the “herd” murder of Facundo Báez Sosa introduces us to the issue of “moral evil” and the loss of the sacred value of life. The famous “expired” that one of the young man’s murderers pontificated upon seeing the corpse is almost a painting of what is current in our way of life. The other was transformed and it was already a closed file. It is no more, it does not exist and they went to eat hamburgers while between chats they looked for “marijuana flowers” with the aim, perhaps, of sedating barbarism. Drugs seem to be largely ignored in the analysis of this “herd” barbarism.
Ortega y Gasset taught us about this current psychosis, as Recalcatti mentions, which is from our point of view a cultural malaise when he told us: “We don’t know what happens to us and that’s what happens to us.” It is navigating in confusion and Dante in turn told us that “confusion is the beginning of the evil of cities”.
DRUGS AND “HERDS”
The life stories of today’s patients portray to us this cultural malaise, social psychosis, and prevailing confusion. A patient told me part of his life and told us in a group that he lived among “heartless.” He surprised me with this phrase since he mentioned – without expressly saying so – “moral evil” as the trademark of psychopaths as taught by the teacher of Psychiatry Henry Ey.
This is how he defined those who had lost the moral axis and the sacred value of life; what today is called with the validity of the drug the “moral neuro” (damages in the prefrontal cortex). There the moral coldness is absolute.
Patients teach us what is lived in those nights of fury where the other is an enemy to exterminate, beings that vegetate between crack pipes, cocaine, marijuana, various alcohols. I asked one of them if they fed in the middle of that maelstrom; he told me that some crumb sandwich, that didn’t matter he repeated to me since the fundamental thing was the voracity of consumption; that was the food. In those “bearers” situations were concocted that today seem embarrassing.
The severity of today’s addictive situations exceeds all the standards of other years due to the voracity of consumption and the deterioration with which patients arrive at the consultation. Everyday events cover up the truth of the void and the anonymous insubstantiality that Recalcatti mentioned (a world of anonymous people not of singular and sacred people).
This is how we began with the murder of Gesell when one of the perpetrators only managed to say “it expired”, there seems to be the maximum coldness: “Let another one come, this one is no longer alive”.
The adventures of the night owls managed by night industries and prostitution are something common for those of us who work in the urgency of guards, such as serious problems of violence where the adrenaline ardor is confused and overlaps with the use of all kinds of drugs and alcohol.
The coldness and moral “blindness” are noticeable there. It is trivial for those of us who live attending life emergencies. Then society chooses events that are shocking in themselves but that in reality today are part of the daily life of professional work.
The now famous phrase “expired” in one of the messages about the death on the sidewalks of the bowling alley is the reflection that in the maelstrom of addiction to violence and daysless nights in a true game of “bats” (animal nocturnal) that exceed all limits, including those that mark the reality of the circadian cycles (we are diurnal beings by nature), life loses the sacred value that the Ethical Law of caring for the Other and others marks to be just another object to be trampled on and massacre.
The “expired” shows that it is a finished issue (file closed) and that “flowers” (of marijuana) come as requested in the “chats” to sedate, celebrate and try to forget that guilt that will haunt them until the end of their lives. days.
No matter how antisocial the actors are (the antisocial personality is an important element in today’s postmodern “gondolas” and is even highly valued in some social sectors) social or internal punishment always appears.
Antisocials seem to be “stars” today and there are all kinds of them and they are sought after because they do not have a fundamental human attribute of guilt and remorse. Transas, dealers, violent, “barras bravas”, exploiters of women, managers of VIP prostitutes and so on.
The drug helps “moral blindness” (the frontal as a differential lobe with apes is a system where civilization is based).
The antisocial become “professional-entrepreneurs” who manage the organized “megabarbarism” that Edgar Morin masterfully described in these times: “.hyperindividualism, mass drugs and wandering of love.”
In similar terms, in 1983 Octavio Paz (Mexican writer and philosopher) predicted today’s darkness in his book “Cloudy Weather”. It hurts to see it so obvious. Other antisocials are the “cannon fodder” of the managers of the Decadence (they will die young or jails will be their destiny). It seems to be the reality of “Hell is the others” in the best style described by JP Sartre; to beat him, trample him and everything within a chemical frame of exaltation.
ETHICAL FALL
Life in this context of ecstasy and vertigo is no longer sacred. The fact that life is sacred is the beginning of Ethics and that is why antisocials rank high in this society since they are “useful labor”.
Ethics arises from the recognition of the sacredness and validity of the Other and the others as witnesses of our ability to serve and donate. The antisocial does not look for witnesses but accomplices.
We even all ask the Judge and the Prosecutors to bring order, although they, crammed with cases, try not to be challenged and we delusionally believe that the problem lies there. They need to be, but the problem far outweighs these last decadent readers.
The problem of the lack of social and family support; but the Judge already receives a dregs and anomic society from absent, violent or permissive families (if there are no stable, sensitive, dialogue and reliable family networks, life is difficult to live); a school also absent in many cases in the promotion of values.
The drug problem confronts us with the problem of the transmission of values: value as a guide on the road, a light that illuminates our path and is the forge of any project. From the prism of values everything looks different. We are pilgrims and there the value is hierarchy, ordering.
The “heartless” that we describe, fallen into marginality and simian coldness, lost and/or no one ever transmitted value signals to him; then he was left without reality and without a path. On the shoulder All this is accompanied by the culture of malaise that surrounds us with a supposedly “progressive” discourse in which consuming is a sign of freedom. Discourse that floods all the networks and that cancels all different thoughts. It is the soft totalitarianism of A. Arendt or the Soft Power of Byung-Chul Han (a South Korean philosopher residing in Germany).
It is a Yes to everything; everything is possible since the rules and limits are the heritage of thoughts that delay. This is the best way to dominate. Rod Dreher – American journalist and writer (student of the “woke” cancellation culture in his book “Living Without Lies) borrows from Hannah Arendt the notion of soft totalitarianism.
Soft totalitarianism is not only interested in political power but also in the “soul” of people, their minds and control of all human activity, based more on psychological manipulation than on open violence.
This soft totalitarianism needs a numb and anesthetized population. One part will be made by ignorance and fanaticism and another part will be made by drugs. The more consumption increases, the more “failed” are the communities to control them because money in a money culture or the threat of death to those who oppose it or the silencing of their opinions operate as a deadly balm.
It is also that the culture of cancellation, by condemning us to relativism, gives rise to a huge plethora of antisocial personalities that increases even due to brain damage in the neuro-moral centers of the nervous system (prefrontal cortex).
The son does not seem to exist in social and political discourse. Only the prestigious cell phone accompanies them in the autistic monologue that is coming. Without strong families there is no possible nation Family life is the matrix of the Law and this arises from meetings, stories, experiences, being, wanting, fighting. Today we live more alone. The wallet or stealing something from someone are the witnesses of our discomfort.
Is it possible to live without “nomos” (Law) in an anomie where the son sends the Father or the Mother and where they even celebrate the previous one or the alcoholization?; but everything has consequences, we can do what we want and ignore and reproach the human Law that the Other is sacred, but we have to assume the consequences.
Today we are supposedly freer, but we are more alone in childhood to face life and in old age to have company in death. We are like when after the World War of 40 W. Churchill asked a scholar of psychoanalysis and child knowledge D. Winnicott about the problem of the number of children alone due to the death of their parents (now we are witnessing “another death” parents) and the teacher told him the following: “Fill our country with adoptive families because without families there will be no Democracy”. Without families there will be no Possible Nation.
Otherwise, due to what we see in our addictive emergency clinical activities, the Void begins to be filled with alcohol, the “joint” until it reaches cocaine as the final destination. The world of the “heartless” and those who coldly pronounce “expired” arises.