“Credo quia absurdum” wrote Tertullian in De Carne Christi. The early Christian thinker who believed in what he considered absurd, vindicated the absurdity, erecting it as a reason to believe in the resurrection of Christ, confronting heresies and dualistic theologies.
Two millennia later, the absurdity is once again vindicated, this time in a degraded version, by the emergence of inconceivable leaderships that build power with crazy speeches and ridiculous statements. Leaders who use the word as a sound object intended to excite, not explain; to exacerbate and mobilize, not to convince.
It is not about the “absurdity” that since the 20th century has helped explore the meaninglessness of existence in the pages of Sartre, Camus, the surrealist writers and the theater of Ionesco. This is a bizarre version that seeks to overthrow reason.
Trump is the greatest exponent of the decadent rebirth of the absurd, with leaders with an authoritarian matrix who agree, on the left and right, in saying and affirming ridiculous things without them having negative consequences for them, no matter how implausible they may be.
Justifying the commutation of the sentence of George Santos, imprisoned for fraud and identity theft, the New York tycoon said that this former Republican legislator “was a bit rogue, but there are many rogues who are not in prison.”
What for Trump were “mischief” were actually crimes. But the president who sinks suspicious boats in the Caribbean, in addition to persecuting and imprisoning immigrants, opened the doors of prison to a serial fraudster because “he had the intelligence and conviction to always vote for Republicans.”
Before that, he had proposed taking over Gaza, expelling its population and turning that territory into a tourist paradise without Palestinians. A year later, seeking to score points for the Nobel, he mixed Biden’s proposals that he had mocked, with Tony Blair’s project, to be “the peacemaker of Gaza.” What he plagiarized put him on the path of what was reasonable and useful, but his first proposal was ridiculous and humanly despicable.
The absurd statements with which Trump mobilizes drives and phobias of multitudes eager to hate progressivism, woke culture, feminism, intellectuals, etc., would fill robust volumes. But the lack of consequences could be about to end. The last sign was the massive “No King Day” mobilizations, with oceans of people flooding large and small cities to repudiate the authoritarianism of the president who uses the word as a sound object to exacerbate, instead of using it as an instrument of reason.
“Chaque mot a des consequences et chaque silence aousi” (every word has consequences and every silence too) wrote Sartre in “Les Temps Modernes”, the publication on political, philosophical and literary topics that he created together with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
That words have consequences proves that they have meaning. That is why when words stop having consequences, democracy declines.
Dictatorships and autocracies are based on force, but liberal democracy is based on reason. That is why the rule of law needs the word. It is the instrument of reason.
That is precisely one of the many signs that the rule of law is in danger. The system that made the northwestern hemisphere free and developed is hampered by inconceivable leaders who use the word as a sound object to shock, not to convince; to exacerbate or mobilize, not to explain.
Such leaderships undermine democracy from the left and the right. Chávez began, recounting Bolívar’s autopsy, and Maduro crossed all the limits of imbecility with a long collection of delirious statements.
But the biggest current offensive comes from recalcitrant conservatism that idolizes mega-millionaires as superior beings.
Trump is the ultimate expression of crazy rhetoric. His Argentine fan also makes the word a sound object, although at this point it seems to be losing its impact capacity.
Argentina heard Milei saying that Bullrich planted bombs in kindergartens and then saw him make her a minister; He heard him accuse Luis Caputo and Sturzenegger of causing irreparable economic damage and then saw him hand over the command of the economy to them; She heard him promise that he would put an end to “the caste” and then saw him fill his government with exponents of that miserable stratum.
Authoritarian culture looms behind leaders who speak without their absurd statements having consequences. Jorge Taiana cannot use the word “dictatorship” to define a dictatorship. He says that “a democracy with flaws” prevails in Venezuela. Desolate as the silence of those who, on their own path, had to correct it by pronouncing the word dictatorship.
Gabriel Boric says it clearly, being from the left. But Evo Morales, Luis Arce, and Rafael Correa cannot, among others who, like the leadership to which Taiana belongs, would have been splashed by PDVSA petrodollars that financed the construction of Chávez’s leadership on a regional scale.
If Milei has to go to Washington every now and then, it is not because his presence is necessary to ask for life preservers for successive shipwrecks, but because he needs the strength of the image to make up for the weakness of the word. Milei travels in search of photos. Photos with Trump; always with his thumbs up and clutching the folder and the case to his chest.
The only thing clear in this country, increasingly similar to the desolate country road where Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot in Becket’s work, is that in Mieli’s economy “the invisible hand of the market” was replaced by the visible hand of Scott Bessent.
The words no longer provoke anything because, as in the United States, they have been emptied. That’s why Milei accumulates miles to look for photos in which she hugs Trump with the look and smile of a cholulo admirer. Photos that have more impact on the covers than the articles.
If something managed to reverse this decline in liberal democracy, words and silences would once again have consequences, as the existentialist philosopher who wrote Being and Nothingness.
