The Sacristan's Lesson
"Oh, with Mario, right? Are you a sexist, too?" Ana says indignantly at the guest's biased and masculine response.
–Primate –Hans raises the stakes–. The primates won the war. The strength of the species against Christ, Marx, Bakunin. The triumphant return to the mists of time. Each one to his own tree and fight. Liberty, fraternity… damn it!
The crude and raspy dialogue is from A Place in the World (1992), a film directed by Adolfo Aristarain and starring Federico Luppi, Cecilia Roth, and Spaniard José Sacristán, who plays Hans, a Galician geologist—but of German descent—who has mutated from anarchist idealism to capitalist realism. If he previously worked tirelessly for the revolution, today he limits himself to studying the San Luis soil to swell the coffers of the sinister mayor Andrada and various multinationals.
Sacristán has recently displayed a similar—albeit more mature and healthy—pragmatism in real life. Faced with the corruption case rocking Pedro Sánchez's socialist government in Spain, the actor, despite his social democratic convictions and long-standing sympathy for the party of the rose, was blunt: "This is simply unacceptable. And the solution must be definitive."
Although Sacristán wasn't the only one in the progressive cosmos to speak out. El País, which no one can suspect of being a reactionary newspaper serving the interests of the opposition Popular Party, published an editorial titled "Broken Credibility." In it, it argues that the image of the socialist leader is seriously damaged and demands decisive action to prove the transparency of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE ). Former president Felipe González, leaders of the red party, and intellectuals and artists close to the leftist constellation followed similar discursive paths. A centrifugal self-criticism that breaks away from partisan bias and separates the contingent (the leaders) from the essential (the convictions).
As is well known, corruption also contaminates Argentina. Several days ago, the Supreme Court upheld Cristina Fernández's six-year prison sentence. One might be tempted to draw parallels with the motherland, but the problem is that the atmosphere in our nation is very different. While in Spain, evidence has closed the gap in social perception (the right and much of the left agree on the seriousness of the events), in Argentina, it has deepened it and, moreover, has acted as a marker of identity: if you believe the evidence, you're a "gorilla"; otherwise, you're a "baboon" (yes, we Argentines have a problem with the zoology-politics marriage). In short, judicial action has coagulated the two sociopolitical souls of the country.
In Argentina, public debate—or what's left of it—has been co-opted by motivated reasoning: we process the information we receive in a way that allows us to reach the conclusion we desire. We tailor the data to the needs of our cause. And we turn off the tap of critical information; if our "kuka" friend sends statistics via WhatsApp or our "fascist" aunt shows us a reel against Cristina Kirchner, we dismiss the material—without even looking at it—simply because of who's sending it; the message matters little or nothing.
The country has entered a kind of dry rationality. Deliberative thinking has succumbed to heuristic thinking. Mental shortcuts, calibrated by partisan identity or loyalty to a person, guide our analyses and, of course, something we greatly underestimate: our relationships, such as who we marry, share a barbecue with, or go on a trip with. We increasingly bond with those who think and feel the same way. Thus, political insularity leads to homophily.
At the same time, moral absolutism is corroding political conversation. As in a theocratic regime, every issue or public policy divides the stage into saints and demons. Ideological dyads are losing traction in popular language: state vs. market, wealth distribution vs. private property, secularism vs. religious denomination, cosmopolitanism vs. nationalism. Now it's a matter of raising a finger and, according to the narrative wielded by the other, declaring: "good or bad person." Period. Let the next heretic come in . ß
Director of the Master's Degree in Political and Business Communication and the Digital Laboratory of Political Narratives at Camilo José Cela University
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