We connect across a screen. He’s in Tunisia, where he spends a large part of the year. “I’ve used the informal tú with you, and you can do the same,” he says by way of introduction. It stirs in me a deep sense of respect. Santiago Alba Rico is a Spanish Marxist writer, essayist and philosopher. A man forthright in his words, yet unfailingly kind in his manner. And we sit down to talk about happiness, the modern world and its speeds, and the loss of meaning.
These are thorny matters. Does it still make sense to pursue happiness in a world that has made it an imperative? Can we speak truthfully in a society where all opinions demand to be deemed “respectable”? What has happened to the meaning of words in this modern age, where speaking is easier than ever? Has freedom lost its most essential meaning, dissolved into a sea of demands?
These, and many other questions, are what we address in what may well have been, without doubt, one of the most interesting conversations I have had this year.
-For you, Santiago, is there a secret to happiness?
Well, I don’t think happiness exists, at the outset, and therefore there can be no secret to it. I suppose there are different approaches to achieving at certain moments in life a bit of stability, so as to enjoy pleasures that are more or less immediate, which are compatible with the ideological and ethical coherence of human beings. But I oppose the very idea of happiness. I find it to be a trap, more or less suggested or induced by a framework that is simultaneously technological and economic. We are compelled to be happy, and that is why I think we must rebel against the very notion of happiness.
In any case, I would say that we should ensure that nothing and no one prevents us from enjoying our friends, family, lovers, the sun and the rain. In other words, all those things that ultimately constitute our fundamental relations with the world.
–As you rightly say, happiness has become a modern imperative. But we often reduce that form of well-being to consumption, performance or overstimulation. Is it truly possible to care for ourselves in a context like this?
It is very hard, because I think what we emphatically call happiness is interpreted in terms of highly narcissistic states, of great loneliness. States that have to do with consumption, the new technologies, the way we approach things and events at a speed at which they cannot even be grasped between the fingers.
Everything keeps slipping away from us, and, I insist, we tend to conceive ourselves as completely autonomous beings, isolated from others. Consequently, in what we are calling happiness, there is a technological and narcissistic element that I believe is incompatible with true well-being. The need we all feel — which is very clear at the moment — to rest on a human shoulder, to lay our head on someone’s chest and be given a caress. That is something new technologies do not provide, nor does consumption.
-In your books and interviews you have spoken about the acceleration of the world. What effects does speed have on us?
Above all, a radical loss of attention. We are unable to concentrate on anything long enough for it to exist before our eyes. In other words, what we are doing is depriving objects of existence. Things have to endure before our eyes to acquire existence and value.
We live in a world in which the British Museum won’t let you stand before a painting for more than three minutes, as if a masterpiece could be exhausted in three minutes. A world in which an eight-year-old child in the United States cannot stay focused on the same activity for more than 80 seconds. In a world where we are unable to pause before things, before bodies.
We live in a world in which we are unable to pause before things, before bodies.
And the little time we have is stolen from us by the entertainment industry and the new technologies. Thinking in that way is very difficult, like thinking while riding a horse, or thinking on a cosmic rocket. At certain speeds, you cannot think.
-We live in a paradoxical era in this sense. Never has it been easier to speak, and at the same time never harder to uncover something true. What has happened to language in the digital age?
Somehow we have used so many terms, sometimes with ill intent or with such openly manipulative purpose, that we have ended up distrusting words. I think these are some of the fundamental questions that currently have no answer.
What do things mean? If you consider what has happened to terms like democracy, humanitarianism, progress, these are words that have been misused to such an extent that they have lost their meaning. And not only do they mean nothing, but sometimes they claim to mean the opposite. Think, for example, of the term freedom. Freedom is highly polysemous and has meant many things throughout history. But in principle freedom should have nothing to do with freedom to harm others, to shelter oneself behind one’s own hedges of spines against others, or to justify weakening another’s security.
We are running short on words. And this, I think, makes it easier for anyone to declare something a sacred truth. I believe this helps explain the rise of far-right movements. With what has come to be called, in a truly fraudulent and troubling euphemism, alternative facts or post-truth.
-As if everything could be true…
Exactly. As if everything could be equally true. We have a right to proclaim or articulate any principle and demand for it the same respect as for any other, and that results in vaccines being treated as equally valid an opinion as antivaccine views; that the notion of a round Earth is an equally legitimate opinion as flat-Earth theory; and that, in short, one can say anything and demand acknowledgement for whatever passes through our minds.
And look, I think this is important. I have said it a few times. Because when you don’t believe in anything, you are on the brink of believing anything. Absolute mistrust is the threshold of maximum credulity. When you can no longer believe in institutions, you cannot trust science, you cannot trust rational thought, then you can believe anything — from chemtrails in the sky contaminating our beers to the Earth being flat. And that is a problem.
-Can this situation be reversed in any way?
We must restore the link between words and things. That link is currently broken. We drift in a world where any word can mean anything. And against that, the danger is that there are people who tell you: “Things mean what I tell you they mean, and they mean only one thing.”
Remember Nietzsche’s “God is dead”? And Dostoyevsky’s: “If God does not exist, all things are permitted.” Well, we must go a little further and say that if God does not exist, and it is very likely we live in a society where God no longer exists, everything must be renamed.
If God does not exist, we no longer know what things mean. So there are many people who need, in the midst of economic insecurity, confusion, and existential uncertainty, to know at least what things signify. And that explains why we end up in a kind of fanatical narrowing of meaning, the hallmark of religious fanaticism.
-And where the things mean too many things, there occurs an identity contraction. I want woman to be woman, that man be man, that wine be wine and bread be bread, and that words mean a single thing. No, the world is ambiguous, but there are moments when the ambiguity is so vast and the ground of meaning so eroded that many people demand linguistic clarity, a narrowing of meaning, in the face of polysemy. And the one who now names things is not God, but a providentialist politician, a strongman—or a Trump—who, with a swagger and a brutally direct candour, tells you how things are.
