Has the world gone completely mad?

La sociedad del delirio: un análisis sobre el Gran Reset Mundial
Antonio-Carlos Pereira Menault
Ediciones Rialp
Nov 2023
134 pages
ISBN 9788432165627

---

In this short work, the Spanish jurist and lecturer in Constitutional Law Antonio-Carlos Pereira argues that the Western world is in a worse state than ever previously experienced. It is not that we have lapsed back into the paganism of pre-Christian time as is often said; it is something far worse. We have moved into a condition that might be described as “post-human”, or even “post-world”. Pereira’s analysis is not a hysterical rant about the state of the world, but a carefully reasoned argument. Unfortunately, he is probably right.

Pereira is well aware that every epoch has its Cassandras who tell us that the end is nigh, and yet he considers the evidence for the uniquely dangerous state of our world to be abundant. He lists such things as the insatiable appetite for money, driving financial speculation; the new technological capacities to penetrate into man’s heart and to control him from within, and the amoral world of biotechnology. For this reason, he says, Christianity had in fact more in common with the pagan world it supplanted than with the “post-human” world which threatens to supplant it.

One of the chief drivers of the new “post-human” world is our ever-increasing naive trust in, and servile docility to, the elites, that is the experts who govern us. These elites have successfully engineered profound, negative cultural, ethical and social changes across the globe. Pereira points to the anthropological shift that is taking place across the West in which man’s unique dignity has been forgotten, even to the point where we find our dignity eclipsed by the new-found “dignity” of animals. Such practices as infant euthanasia is spreading in lock-step with a greatly exaggerated sense of animal rights.

Many of the observations made regarding social changes taking place in Spain seem quite applicable to Ireland which certainly resembles Spain in that both are poorer, Catholic countries which have undergone quite quick modernisation and secularisation over the past five or six decades. The Spanish, he observes, have grown more serious, sad (“Spanish people no longer sing in the street”), legalistic, and individualistic.

Another unique phenomenon Pereira points to is the widespread fear we now have of speaking our mind. We no longer share a common set of beliefs, a common world-view. The basic social glue has broken down. Instead of being bound “from below” by a common set of beliefs and principles such as are enshrined in a constitution, our unity is now imposed “from above” by the powers that be. And these powers are increasingly intrusive: more and more facets of ordinary life are now subject to government control and supervision.

And we are being homogenised. Increasingly those who live in Europe or America (we could add the whole anglophone world) espouse the exact same LGBTI and politically correct notions, even though “diversity” is the mantra of the age. We are being “de-humanised” by omnipresent technocratic and financial forces. That there is an existential crisis unfolding which is is simply being ignored – for example, Pereira points to the fact that more young Spanish people die by suicide than by traffic accidents. While the obsession with road safety in Spain has lead to legal speed limits being reduced to the speed of bicycles, the suicide epidemic goes largely ignored.

Increasingly, given the breakdown of civic buy-in from its citizens, government – in Spain at least – is “government by fear”. As he says, it is easier to receive a fine now than under the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera or Franco. At the same time citizens are being co-opted into the role of policing their fellow citizens and being encouraged to report the infractions of others. Fewer and fewer areas of the life of a citizen – journeys, financial transactions, interpersonal interactions and interaction within one’s home – escape the watchful eye of the State. The multitude of horizontal interpersonal relationships in society is  being replaced by the one State-individual relationship. Pereira laments the decline of the once healthy rebelliousness of Spaniards who had a robust scepticism about the reach of law, but now have become more legalistic, pliable and subservient than, he says, even the Germans. Again it strikes me that Ireland does not lag far behind. “It is,” he says, “as if people – many people – have pacifically internalised their loss of freedom.” “These Spaniards are credulous; they believe in the State and in its law, and even more in that of the European Union and its experts.” And this applies also – perhaps even especially – to the universities which were once the bastion of healthy youthful non-conformity.

By way of gesturing towards a solution to this crisis, Pereira mentions the need for the return of one simple virtue – prudence, or what we even call just plain common sense. We need a return to the orienting role of the kind of common sense which helps us to judge what is excessive or even plain irrational in laws and policies being imposed on us from above. It is not that people are bad, he says, just lacking in the prudential virtues. Furthermore we need to return to those horizontal relationships – familial, social and cultural as well as simple friendships which are outside the purvey of State surveillance and control.

All in all this is a very timely book. It is more of a wide-ranging essay in which the dominant themes are mused upon rather than dealt with in a systematic manner. Certainly I think Pereira’s fundamental insight into the fact that many of our basic freedoms have been slowly and surreptitiously abolished by the national and especially transnational organisations which govern our lives, and that many of the features of the changed Spanish society unfortunately appear to be mirrored here in Ireland.