These are dirty times. Times of leaders and crowds that idolize millionaires instead of admiring the most brilliant minds in the most humble personalities.
Times when the West worships plastic totems and oozes grotesque leadership. Something that Carl Sagan already perceived at the end of the 20th century and called “glorification of stupidity.”
That is why plutocracy reappears. Camouflaged in extremist ideologies, the idea reappears that the ancient Greeks defined as cratos (power) in the hands of Pluto, who in Hesiod’s Theogony is the god of wealth and, in his comedy about that deity, Aristophanes describes being blinded by Zeus so that he distributes wealth equitably, instead of accumulating it in a few hands. In short, the idea that political power should also be, like economic power, in the hands of the rich. Which implies attributing to them a natural superiority over the rest of the citizens that grants them the right to govern them.
In times of fascination with the powerful, humility and simplicity constitute acts of rebellion and trenches of resistance.
For statistics and reason, it is clear that it is easier to become a millionaire than to refuse a million dollars. However, today an immense majority in the world seems to believe the opposite.
There are too many who admire those who amass infinite fortunes, without considering the greatness of those who, living justly, refuse to receive a million-dollar prize. That is why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukkerberg are so well known, but almost no one knows Gregori Perelman, the Russian mathematician who won a million dollars for having solved an inextricable enigma, but refused to receive them and continued living almost like a homeless person in Saint Petersburg.
If intelligence and lucidity guided these times, it would draw more attention if a person, being considered the most brilliant mathematician worldwide, rejected the fortune that was offered to him as a prize for having solved the Poincaré Conjecture. An unproven statement formulated in 1974 by the French mathematician Henry Poincaré about the Topology of Three-Dimensional Spaces, and Perelman was able to demonstrate in 2003.
For this intellectual and scientific feat, the famous Clay Institute of Mathematics, based in Massachusetts, awarded him one million dollars. But Perelman rejected it to highlight the pure search for knowledge as a superior attitude to the search for fame and money.
The fortune they offered him mattered as much to Diogenes as the luxuries and pleasures that Alexander the Great offered him because of the admiration he professed for him. And just as the cynical philosopher responded to Alexander’s “ask me whatever you want” by asking him “to run because you block the sun from me,” the Russian scientist asked to remain a stranger who walks the streets of Saint Petersburg like a ghost.
Gregori Grisha Yakovlevich Perelman could also have shone on the world’s stages as a virtuoso violinist, a gift discovered by his mother and also a violin teacher when he was very young. But applause and praise interest him as little as money. That is why he preferred the poor, solitary and anonymous life he leads.
This life choice adopted by the owner of an intelligence superior to that of the rest of mortals and, by the way, also to that of the mega-millionaires who today shine in the Olympus of societies, is much more extraordinary than the ability to multiply money, gravitate to governments and show mansions in glossy magazines.
It is the world that Almudena Grandes described as filled with “instant creations and fleeting satisfactions,” where “ingenuity supplants intelligence and talent.” Therefore, for the author of The Ages of Lulú and the Atlas of Human Geography, at this time “reading is an act of resistance.”
Resistance includes taking ownership of reading choice. The market, advertising and fashions also impose herd behavior on readers and, as Nietzsche explained, “dignity begins in the act of resisting the pressure of the herd.”
Haruki Murakami explained the consequence of giving in to herd pressure when it comes to reading: “If you only read the books that everyone else reads, you are going to think the same thing that everyone else thinks.” Something that the ideologues of totalitarianism knew and that is weakening current democracies by generating unprecedented leaderships from social networks that say brutalities without causing astonishment or repudiation.
In Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm explained how “sick societies produce sick leaders” who “gain strength in the ignorant masses.”
In that book published in 1973, the German philosopher and psychologist uses disciplines such as neurophysiology and paleontology, among others, to explain the instincts of destruction that merge and fission in the human species.
It is a work of anthropology and social psychology that, delving into the disturbances of figures such as Hitler, Himmler and Stalin, investigates how emotional deficiencies and the inability to love and reason with empathy lead to a desire for total control or, failing that, absolute destruction.
Sometimes, these disabilities and deficiencies can be controlled by social behaviors that allow coexistence or, at least, coexistence. For example, the sense of “respect,” which according to Leo Tolstoy “was invented to occupy the empty place where love should be.” But in many cases, the pathologies that incubate societies at different times in history generate different types of pathological leaders.
Trump telling a journalist critical of his government that “she says those things because she is ugly…” and censoring another journalist for asking him an uncomfortable question by telling him “shut up, pig,” is just a sample of the hundreds of cases in which the New York magnate resorts to the use of something as despicable and toxic as bullying. One more of the displays of verbal violence and vindication of cruelty that many ultraconservative leaders make in this time of sick societies and “glorification of stupidity.”
