When he was eight years old, my youngest nephew decided to say two things: first, that his mother had voted for Milei. Second, that he was going to ask the Three Wise Men for a ball with the American flag on it. Brought up in a family with a progressive tradition, the boy, who is very bright, knew that this had every chance of causing a scandal.
A year earlier, when I was seven, he had shown me one of the games on his tablet, which consisted of being an entrepreneur in the oil world, dazzled by those men in turbans who every so often go on sale and buy a football team. The game consisted of building an oil well in a village and, if it went well, another one in a larger town; then you opened a subsidiary in a city and, if you managed to prosper, you put your last well on the moon. When I asked him why he would want to put an oil well on the moon, he answered with logical disapproval: “It’s clear, otherwise I won’t win the game.” At seven years old, and without knowing it, I was already playing at being a CEO with a shark mentality.
I think about this while reading an article that talks about how fascist the kids are becoming. Not just the right-wing puppies who only need to jump the sidewalk, but even our own people are becoming fascists. They recognize what Pasolini already knew: that fascism is no longer what it used to be. The Italian pointed to consumer society as the “new fascism” and said of it that “it has profoundly transformed young people, it has touched them in their intimacy, it has given them other feelings, other ways of thinking, of living, other cultural models.” According to him, “it is not, as in the time of Mussolini, a superficial, stage-like regimentation, but a real one that has stolen and changed their souls.”
It is true that the idols of most young people are not Bolsonaro, Le Pen or Javier Milei, but influencers, youtubers, bloggers, virtual opinion leaders, football players, elite athletes, singers of packaged music who spend their days selling a way of life sustained by extravagant consumption, by market benefits, by extreme wealth, by the infested theft produced by taxes. A whole catalogue of neo-desires injected deep into the social marrow.
Football is a clear example and a mirror in which these kids look at themselves, and what they see is a glitter and candy spectacle – obviously, also about football – but a mirror in the end of a game sustained by the intense obsession with the wealth of the here and now, immediate, precocious, inserted in societies built on inequality, indifference and dehumanization. All very subtle, very friendly, very aseptic.
The ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas in every era. In ours they are sometimes imperceptible, because the mandates are disguised as freedoms. We have landed in a future that is not ours. With anger stuck in our esophagus: socializing losses and privatizing profits. Unwillingly, or without wishing for it, misfortune has overtaken us. In the end, we are not so different from my little nephew. We all know how the game works.
2024-07-03 15:02:23
#kids #turning #fascists #Opinion
