Originally published in Spanish: “Fenómenos Paranormales”. Eduardo Jordá. La Opinión de Málaga.
Here is a phenomenon to be studied in the future by psychologists and social scientists (and perhaps also by researchers specializing in paranormal phenomena): How is it possible that thousands upon thousands of high-cultured people —university professors, lawyers, engineers, architects, poets, economists— came to be so convinced that the entire world would accept Catalonia’s unilateral independence? How is it possible that people ignored all the European politician’s statements denying the possibility of unilateral independence? What crossed all those people’s minds, otherwise sensible and capable? And how is it possible that those thousands upon thousands of educated, flourishing people, living in a society provided with the highest levels of liberty known in the world, ended up behaving like the members of the Raëlian movement —that picturesque weird creed that believes in the upcoming arrival of extra-terrestrials? Or even worse, what led them to suffer from collective hallucinations, comparable to the 900 members of Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple who committed mass-suicide in Guyana? What happened in their minds? What happened?
I can think of three hypotheses. The first one is related to what the ageing Freud described as both the reality principle and the pleasure principle that rule the workings of our mind. The pleasure principle only seeks an instant satisfaction of our instincts, whereas the reality principle acts as a regulating principle and subjects the seek of pleasure to the conditions imposed by the external world. The pleasure principle is purely emotional, while the reality principle requires a rational control of behaviour. Now then, it is clear that millions of people in Catalonia got carried away by the pleasure principle and forgot completely about the reality principle. When European leaders kept saying that they would not recognize a unilateral declaration of independence, they responded by saying that it was not true. When someone warned Barça that it would not be allowed to play in the Spanish league, they responded by saying that Barça would play wherever it pleased. And when the European Council leaders affirmed that independence would represent the exit from the European Union and the euro, they rebutted it by saying that Catalonia was already part of the European Union and the euro, so it could never ever be expelled out. They would do anything in order to deny the reality principle’s evidence in favour of the reassuring delusions of the pleasure principle.
However, to realize how all this has been possible, we must consider a second element: a formidable communication machinery seeking intoxication on behalf of the largest campaign of lies we have seen in our time. Trump, for all his alternative truths, is just an apprentice compared to what has happened in the media controlled by the Generalitat. And we should not forget the thousands of Twitter users —possibly subsidized; this should be investigated someday— that spent 24 hours a day spreading the institutional lies and bashing whoever dares to contradict them. When the amount of money spent by the Generalitat on agitprop information —that is, agitation and propaganda according to the old Bolshevist formula— gets revealed, all of us who still believe that one of the state’s essential functions is to cater for the most vulnerable, the disabled, the chronical ills, the disadvantaged— will be sardonically laughing. Alas, we must include in this powerful propaganda apparatus thousands upon thousands of professors routinely devoted to falsify the truth and to establish as undisputable truths what only amounted to a monstrous body of lies —the first one, that Catalonia was militarily occupied by Spain in 1714; the second one, that the Spanish Civil War was a war between Spain and Catalonia.
Finally, we have to consider the third element: the terrible narcissism of thousands of young people who grew up in a world where nobody —not even their parents or their teachers— never dared to tell them “no”; and where, in addition, the most solid outlines of reality have disappeared into the liquid universe of Twitter and Instagram. The real challenge to our future is getting to know what will be the role of representative democracy and rule of law —the only social tool to protect the rights of minorities and disadvantaged— in this boiling new world made up of collective hallucinations, the most monstrous lies of propaganda and the narcissism of the new generations that think they are at the centre of the universe and prefer to consider themselves as victims instead of citizens with equal rights and duties for all.
