“Intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism can contain yourself separately, but if you get together there are no hope,” said Albert Camus. It was the 50s but seemed to describe the disruptive leadership of this time. Marxist and fascist totalitarianism made the natural conjugation of intolerance and fanaticism, as religious darkness does. And in this new recoil of history stupidity joined, forming the unstoppable trident.
It is not about spontaneous suppurations of society, but of products created by hate engineering. The one that discovered on social networks the battlefield where the new riders of the Apocalypse attack globalism and Western democracy.
The same usines that satanize multilateralism, are taught with George Soros, deny climate change and hate sexual diversity, in addition to promoting the destruction of the State and considering “communist” to any type of social policy, they are those that select the appropriate characters so that, following counter-liberal recipes, they replace democracy with conservative plutocracies.
Those selected do not resemble the conventional politician and have a suitable personality to channel phobias and repulsions that large sectors must contain when political correction prevails. It is no accident that in northern America a ultraconservative president resorts to violent disqualification, by case by calling Nancy Pelosi “degenerate disgusting”, while his South American fans Bolsonaro and Milei exhibit a morbid pleasure when insulting with extreme vulgarity.
The brutality in rhetorical violence appears in the counter-liberal leadership manual. Those leaders are really like that but, following those recipes, they exacerbate their dark side.
The manual recommends numbing the society by naturalizing cruelty. That does Trump by cutting social programs and paranating humanitarian organizations that fight hunger in the world. And Milei does it by using corruption in social assistance to cut all kinds of assistance, including people with disabilities.
Aided by a new ignorance, the messianism of this time makes broad social stripes stop believing in obvious history, to hold on to history told in the format of social networks.
This was how Trump imposed the implausible image that the World Trade System promoted by Washington 80 years ago and capitalism with Welfare State that rescued the economy of the great depression already then defeated, first, first, the III Reich and the Japanese Empire, and then to the USSR in the Cold War, ended with the greatness of the United States, when it is evident that the opposite happened.
It is necessary to “claim the right not to tolerate intolerant,” said Karl Popper, through the “tolerance paradox”, in his book The open society and its enemies. John Rawls defended the need to tolerate even intolerant, but set a limit. For the author of two great books of liberal thought, the theory of justice and political liberalism, the limit comes when intolerance puts freedom and justice at risk.
Decades before, Camus had the vision that seems to describe what many countries are living today, including Argentina. To explain the assert of leaders who touch the unpresentable, John Carlin included the possibility that technologies that reduce the need to accumulate knowledge and exercise the mind to face questions and problems, is producing negligent and uncultivating generations. In the roots is the death of the predictable, caused by the increasingly accelerated technological evolution. A vertiginous process that has humanity in uncertainty.
On the end of the 20th century, the support of traditional politicians began to fall, due to their lack of responses to the fears and uncertainties generated by the acceleration of technological change. Societies then began to look for them outside the system, opening the door to the “outsider”, with exponents such as Berlusconi and Fujimori.
As the answers did not arrive, anti-system were used and, subsequently, to the regressive utopia that blames everything to the political class, intellectuality and journalism, while promising the return to a kind past in which the future could be predicted. This type of leadership was incubated in the users specialized in the conquest of the new public square: social networks.
Real public squares have democratic soul because they are spaces where the different are, that is, there is a unit in difference. On the other hand, social networks are the public square that does not bring the different closer but the opposite: it feeds their phobias until the society in groups that repels.
Contra-liberal usines specialize in feeding phobias so that people agglutinate in villages where everyone listens only to what they are convinced. Thus the intolerance grows to those who feel and think differently, exacerbating the differences until they make them cracks that suppurate hatred of the “other.” This is where the enemy that the autocrat needs replaces the adversary who acts in liberal democracy.
The center is the only space where democracy remains stable. In the poles, the staggering system. That is why center -right and centering are essential. It is the reason why the ideologist of the Alt Right, Steve Bannon, called “dynamit the center.” That does from Putin to Trump, passing through Orban, Netanyahu, Milei, Bolsonaro, in addition to Cassalegio, Grillo and Salvini, among others.
Those leaders do not arise naturally. They are chosen and enhanced by usins that exacerbate social insensitivity; contempt for diversities; the denialism of climate change; the resource of vulgarity and insult; Humiliating expulsions as punishment to their own profile, and alluvional activity generating regressive changes.
All of that explains the counter-liberal manual of the anti-Globalists. Russian and European ideologues mold pathological leaders in social networks. The mold where intolerance, fanaticism and stupidity are mixed.
