Are we really cynical?

The phrase has gone almost unnoticed, as so many scandalous words and actions do in our country these days, but it deserves careful analysis. Pedro Sánchez uttered it during his evasive appearance in the Congress of Deputies on May 7, nine days after the historic Monday when Spain lost power: "And what a great act of cynicism it is to lament the five lives sadly lost due to the blackout and ignore the more than eight thousand lost each year in Spain as a result of climate change."

We are faced with a cold assessment that reduces the death of citizens to a numerical issue and demolishes in one fell swoop one of the great achievements of Western civilization that inspired the Universal Charter of Human Rights: the inescapable attention deserved by the individual, that "concrete human being" of whom Ernesto Sabato spoke in his lucid essays, establishing a basic principle: every life is sacred and must be respected , for a human being is all human beings, and to deny his value is to deny all of humanity as a whole. The five victims of the April 28 blackout deserve no less consideration than those of a catastrophe or a war. Subjecting them to a calculation that minimizes their sacrifice is to agree with Agustín García Calvo, who, from a libertarian pessimism, equated democracies with dictatorships and understood the act of governing as a sinister form of administering death. If we do not share this pessimism and grant an ethic to the responsibility of governing in a regime of freedoms, we cannot accept, as if it were a matter of numbers, the deaths of citizens as the collateral and irrelevant damage of negligence in the management of the electricity supply . And, if this negligence is attributable to the irresponsible execution of an energy program marked by an ideology that, to top it all off, prioritizes the cult of Nature over current well-being and human safety itself, we would be faced with a particularly serious event, which demands a wide range of responsibilities of varying degrees, both theoretical and factual.

We would, in short, be faced with a populist and dehumanizing ultra-environmentalism that puts its environmental utopia before people's own lives. This phenomenon is not new within the framework and chronology of the West. There was already a Hegel who philosophically embraced the thesis that the individual is a sacrificial pawn in the chess game of History, so that it may be fully realized and fulfill its grand destiny, which will benefit humanity in the future. Behind this secular sanctification of the dialectic of History lie the darkest and bloodiest chapters of the 20th century: Nazism and Communism . If "the sleep of reason produces monsters," as Goya's famous etching put it, the sleep of an ideology that dispenses with reason multiplies them. The phenomenon we are witnessing is not new, as I say. The History that Hegel enthroned has been replaced by the totem of the planet. It must be saved from a hypothetical apocalypse at any cost. And the free flow of rivers, like clean energy, is more important than the 227 deaths from the Valencian cold snap or the deaths from the April 28 blackout, whose commemoration is—according to Sánchez—an act of cynicism.