Milei's invention and Morel's invention

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By TARSUS GENUS*

An important lesson to be learned from this historical episode is that Javier Milei won because he behaved like a revolutionary

Javier Milei – prophetic, sick and mythical – reinvents Argentina between the crude decadence of Peronism without a present and ultraliberalism without a future. In this tight space of history, he points out to the nation the intermediaries that lived in his head, from the beginning, without him realizing that they existed, as he only saw them as specters projected by the mechanics of his mental anarchy: Mauricio Macri and Patrícia Burich go , if they can – with iron and fire – govern a country of expatriates in its history.

An important lesson to be learned from this historical episode, in addition to the other conventional lessons that are taking place in the democratic field and especially on the left, is that Javier Milei won because he behaved like a revolutionary, already tactically named as “libertarian” by the mainstream media, which continues to to give him – even attacking him – an explicit admiration for having defeated a bland and projectless left.

Displaced from their imaginary destiny, Argentines voted for those who said they believed that receiving advice from “dead dogs” was healthy originality and that Argentina was “the great world power in the last century”. Argentina dies and post-modern surrealism is recreated in a nation where its main leader of the last century – Juan Domingo Perón – commanded, to his right, Triple A, which led mass murders and, to his left, guided the their most faithful fractions to deliver their fighters to cemeteries without addresses, with the appointment of Izabelita – as their second – knowing that she was going to die soon. Peronism was the caudillesque formation of a social democratic character that took Argentina to a higher social level than the main countries in America, especially favored by the events of the Second World War.

If Jorge Luis Borges lived and wrote after Javier Milei, he could say about him what his disciple and partner Adolfo Bioy Casares put into the mouth of his character, a fugitive in the soap opera. Morel's invention, after he – the fugitive – landed on the island invented by the author. In the narrative, the characters on the island – observed by the fugitive – are just projections: images coming from a mechanic designed to create illusions.

And he, the fugitive, is a paranoid person who thinks that, when “less crude intellects take care of his invention, man will choose a separate, pleasant place, gather the most dear people and remain in an intimate paradise”. In the fugitive's imagination, it is a society of separate groups, each living their own sociality and forming a whole, whose consented human relationship dispenses with any link with anyone outside the convention of isolated groups.

The fugitive, then enchanted by a fictitious woman, who is also a mere “projection” of Morel's illusion machine, suffers from persecutory paranoia and comes to suspect that the beloved woman herself is non-existent. Like the dead dog-parapsychologist, who advises Javier Milei, the fugitive's false vision is an attempt to anchor himself in real life, which gives him the strength to persist and thus not completely reject what could eventually be a mirage, but could also be real. .

Social democracy “involves state responsibility in order to guarantee the basic well-being of citizens” and the ultraliberal or neoliberal vision – depending on the stage at which the reforms are at – says that market anarchy is the situation that generates men and women strong to build and enjoy the basics for a decent life and that the State only gets in the way: it is a machine of corruption and bureaucracy to protect the weak and lazy.

The appeal of more (or less) unhealthy fascist or proto-fascist leaders is certainly stronger in mobilizing people than social democratic proposals in political decline. That appeal is stronger because the possibility lies in the potential immediacy of response, which authoritarianism offers to each subject: the poor and the miserable are deluded that they can quickly enter the world of consumption, if corruption ends, the media are called upon to share in the near future with the rich because everyone can be an entrepreneur – what “is worth your effort” – and the rich support any adventurer who promises to “lower taxes” and block demonstrations – union or political – that hinder their business . The value of democracy is the value of freedom and the remote possibility of equality, but its power structures in the State have not been essentially renewed in the 200 years of its duration.

I cite three aspects of everyday life that make up the political crisis of modern democracy, which generate favorable conditions for the rise of fascism and the precariousness of political democracy: the fragility of public security, which implies a reduction in the quality of life of the popular masses and which makes the lives of young people more “crowded”, therefore, a life of ghettoization surrounded by the deforming culture of “deep” networks and harassment by organized crime, which separate them from the most universal cultural and educational assets and which merge rich and poor into one same illusory commercial universe; territorial segregation and gentrification, in large metropolitan regions, where criminal offers are created to quickly “win in life” and falsely share in the anarchic consumerism of unbridled capitalism, inside and outside the law; the concentration of income and its consequence on popular subjectivity due to the brutal contrast between rich and poor.

Celi Pinto in her beautiful book Time and memories – women’s lives, mentions Paul Ricoeur “who tells us about an anonymous time, which is halfway between private time and public time”, whose separation and integration in memory form a living totality. They create in the individual their particular way of living these two times in one: through memory. I believe we must ask ourselves, if we want to once again propel the world in the direction of Equality, Republic and Freedom, if the dominant time of this historical cycle has not created in the memory – not in the collective but in the memory of isolated individuals – a tomb for the public time.

This may have happened, since all of life today is the hysterical sublimation of the present, focused on the only universal reality: the pulsating market and manipulated consumption. If this is true, the fight will be more difficult than one thinks, since Bioy Casares's fugitive – together with Javier Milei's advisory dogs – will have won: and everyone will be illusory specters eternalized on a Morel island.

*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I


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