Víctor Lapuente (Chalamera, Huesca, 49 years old), a political scientist, professor at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), columnist of El País and an analyst at the SER Chain, was known precisely for that, for his political analysis. But, surprisingly, it has been passed to literature. “I realized that the columns worked better when it showed concrete examples of the theoretical … I think that fiction, more than the analysis, is the way humans have to explain stories,” he says.
Your novel, Immanence (DNA), is also very literary, inspired by Orwell, Atwood or Houellebecq, in which three temporal lines are handled, from the youth of the nineties in a town in Aragon (its people), to a dystopian future in the year 2086. It is not a thriller of pure action: there is literature. But also the brand of the house: a text full of philosophical dialogues, a reflection on the world and how the desire to achieve an ideal society thanks to technology can give oppressive results.
Ask. We are in dystopia time.
Answer. The dystopian future that paint us are always dictatorships or theocracies, and I was thought of a dystopia that was exactly the opposite: a total and completely secular and anti -religious cyber democracy. Seeing the evolution of the populist right it shows that our time is of great distrust of institutions and to the Big Brother.
P. How is that total cyberdemocracy?
R. It works through Frida technology that allows us not to have any institution, the State, nor companies, nor religions, no intermediary. We interact peer-to-peerfrom one to another. This ends the money, but everything becomes a monetary transaction, and human relations in a small market.
P. We are already in that path of individualism.
R. It is an extreme individualism, in which we are already involved, and in which we place everything on an Excel sheet. In this way we dehumanize and become lonely. Already Alexis de Tocqueville, two hundred years ago, imagined a future of lonely people engaged in their own entertainment.
P. And politics?
R. I think the right has great responsibility for having created this economic individualism, this replacement of Christian democracy, which proposed a salary of dignity for workers and not an efficiency salary. Before there was a containment, a God, the social doctrine of the Church. Now nothing stands between the individual and the maximization of the benefit.
P. And on the left?
R. There is something very similar to cultural individualism: responsibilities towards the country have ended, you do not want to talk about duties, everything is rights. The traditional motto of social democracy was “works hard, demands your rights.” Now only the second part is.
I do not believe in nostalgia, in longing for the glorious years, a nostalgia from which the extreme right lives, but I think it is essential to take into account the things that went well in the past
P. Is there imagination to overcome this civilizational stumbling block?
R. Yes, I think there is a lack of ideas, but the book is also a criticism of people who have revolutionary ideas that are not fulfilled. And I treatment several narrative times to show how the good intentions of the present are triggering a future that was not expected. I do not believe in nostalgia, in longing for the glorious years, a nostalgia from which the extreme right lives, but I think it is essential to take into account the things that went well in the past. And you have to build the utopia, but little by little, brick brick.
P. Does anyone want to do it like that?
R. I believe that we have lost this incremental approach. It is enough to see, for example, the debate on the reduction of the working day: either you are a communist or you are an exploiter. The logical thing would be to reach agreements. And the same for the tax on the rich, we have lost the possibility of a pragmatic discussion. Politics has become religion, a religion that we have expelled from our individual sphere. It is a paradox.
P. You talk about an “immanence epidemic“.
R. Immanence is the opposite of transcendence, it is something that lives in itself. Human beings have become that: we have put the goals in ourselves. We ask ourselves, for example, if having children is a cost or a benefit, not what contributes to humanity or the new life. And we apply that to everything. I defend in the book that, beyond this narcissism, there is a religious significance that is worth it, but that you have to be careful with those religious leaders who have used it for oppression.
P. You live in Sweden. The Nordic countries, with their strong welfare state, are sometimes considered a good mixture of capitalism and communism.
R. It is not a perfect system, and several of its problems are shown in the book. But I think you can learn a lot from the pragmatism of the Nordics, who have managed to maintain religion out of politics and reach consensus. There, in 1936, the representatives of capital and labor sat to negotiate and build the welfare state. There was a war here.
“Some men just want to see the world to burn,” says his butler Alfred. And, in fact, the FBI has a new category of terrorism that is the nihilist extremism
P. The striking thing is that they have proven success, but, nevertheless, not many seem to have them as a model to follow.
R. They are probably the most successful countries in history by combining equality, productivity, technological innovation … they join the best market with the best of the state. But on the right it is not interested because it is a high tax model and the left because it is a model of great individual responsibility and pragmatism. Here few people have had this for flag, they tried in citizens, and perhaps also the generation of the socialists of Javier Solana.
P. In the extreme right, very contradictory, ultra -liberal ideas are gathered to paleoconservators …
R. There is a general disenchantment that produces rejection of the liberal order. And also connects with that deeply individualistic and narcissistic background. It looks like an unnatural alliance, but that is being very successful, because it appeals to that selfishness. The lack of future also fosters nihilist positions, as a villain of Batman. “Some men just want to see the world to burn,” says his butler, Alfred. And, in fact, the FBI has a new category of terrorism that is nihilist extremism. There are conspiracy theories that point to everyone to generate confusion and chaos.
P. There is a lot of philosophical dialogue in his novel, such as this.
R. Yes, I wanted to write a thriller Where the question was not just who is the murderer, but what is the meaning of life. The great issues of humanity.