THE LOGIC OF THE ABSURD

Francisco de Goya

x Jorge Majfud: The absurdity that creates and sustains a certain reality becomes the logic of the majorities

Imagine two social situations, two collective absurdities. In one (let's call it Absurd A), each of the individuals of a country, of the entire planet, possesses exactly the same wealth as its neighbor.

Its defenders would argue that there are, at least, two reasons for that reality: first, the wealth generated by each individual is not due solely to his merit and individual effort but to a series of achievements and efforts that derive from the whole society (of living and dead for thousands of years, of course). The second reason would be: although not everyone can contribute in the same way, in the same proportion, it is for a moral reason that the strong should help the weak and not the other way around. After all, these ideas have been in the books (not in the practices) of all the religions known throughout the history of humanity, with the only exception of some contemporary sects that claim that Jesus asks his pastors who bleed their church members to pay a private plane of 54 million dollars.

Why would this be absurd or too radical? Well, it could be argentar, because we are not all equal. Some are born more intelligent than others, others have a capacity for work and greater sacrifice, and so on. That there is a plethora of lazy millionaires with mental deficiencies is a detail in which we are not going to enter now.

Vicent Van Gogh

Potato eaters

Then, imagine the opposite. Imagine an Absurd B, something even more absurd than the Absurd A.

Imagine a country, a world where ten percent of the population owns as much wealth as half of the population of that country, of that society ...

No, we better exaggerate a little more to make it more dramatic: imagine a country, a society where one percent of the population accumulates as much wealth as half of that country, or as half of the entire world ...

Just a moment. One percent of the world would be more than seventy million people, something like the population of Turkey or England. No, let's exaggerate a little more. For Absurd B, imagine that one hundred people own the same as the poorest half of the world's population, that in the richest and most powerful country in the world, the United States, 60 percent barely reaches six percent of all the wealth generated by that country, that in other regions, such as in Latin America, the disproportions are even greater. And so, let's continue with the imagination, exaggerating even the caricature of the Absurd B. You just have to be careful, as in a torture session you must preserve the life of the interrogated, because if we exaggerate the global system would collapse and that would not serve them to the one hundred men who own almost everything.

The most important difference between Absurd A and Absurd B is that Absurd B exists and is what we have come to after centuries of technological and economic progress.

True, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish where the right point lies between Absurd A and Absurd B, but, in any case, it does not seem reasonable to hold either of the two absurdities. Less the greater of the two absurdities.

An absurdity is not revealed by its existence, but quite the opposite: the absurdity that creates and sustains a certain reality becomes the logic of the majorities. If humanity believes that the Earth is flat because it is a truism that is demonstrated alone; if someone burns a man because he does not understand some theological complexity and then the burning extends to hundreds and thousands for the same reasons; if a husband kills his wife because a virgin did not arrive at marriage because that was written in some sacred book followed by millions; if everyone repeats that modernity is not due to centuries of inventors, scientists, thinkers, social activists and humble workers who financed all this effort, but to revered, brilliant and super-billionaire CEOs, it is because these absurdities have been normalized and defended with ferocity as if they were births of logic or Mother Nature. More when the power that sustains an absurdity is so disproportionate that it feeds from above and from below, from the left and from the right; when it feeds and defends itself with the hypocrisy of those who benefit from the absurdity and with the fanaticism of those who must suffer it every day, as if it were a long drought or an endless rain.

The Haine