At the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there is a painting that I have always liked very much, games for childrenpainted by Brueghel the Elder in 1560. It seems like a splendid catalog of children’s games (up to: from the tavern to the blind man’s chicken, from marbles to bowling), but in reality it produces a disturbing effect on the spectator. Why? Perhaps because Brueghel gathers a crowd in an open space, as in The triumph of Death? I’m looking for someone who feels the same way as me and I finally find him. “I have looked at this painting hundreds of times,” writes educationalist Heike Freire, “and the most curious thing is that I don’t see children anywhere: I see people of all ages. I see bodies that look more like adults.” In fact it is exactly like this: it is not the crowd that imitates the triumph of death; It’s that they are the same bodies, robust, adults, sinners. Brueghel the Elder paints adults playing AS children, who invoke and thus postpone the inevitable triumph of death.
Childhood is these two things: play and nothingness. It’s the game or nothing. We unreasonably identify play with improvisation, spontaneity and mischief. It’s not like that. The game is made of rules and children, we know, take the rules very seriously. They may have invented them, but they demand their fulfillment with Kantian peremptoriness. “Is it okay that we shipwrecked on a desert island and built a cabin and Alberto was a monster who tried to eat us and Ana came to save us?” In this “is this okay?”, the natural foundation of literature itself, all the solemnity that children give to narrative is expressed.
When you stop playing, you fall back into nothingness. Nothingness are the primary drives: the desire for food, sex, exclusive territory; that is, power. And the fear of not having food, sex or territory; that is, impotence. When we stop playing, in bed at night, desire and fear take over our souls, like cannibalistic predators. If it were not for the game, desire and fear would destroy the world without stopping. Children play and play, with cheerful seriousness, against the desire and against the fear to which they return when they have stopped playing. The very serious play of childhood preserves the death drive for a while.
than adults stop playing This does not mean that they mature; It means, on the contrary, that they stop taking things seriously and run the risk, precisely for this reason, of continually falling into nothingness. The only way to pretend to be of age towards the human condition is to adopt the game, now outdated, as hypocrisy. They are the rules we respect but don’t believe in: those of marriage, those of parenthood, those of courtesy, those of democracy, those of the UN. When hypocrisy is abandoned, as Donald Trump does, it falls back into the other lap of childhood; that is, in nothingness. Trump appears to be playing; But it seems like they are playing, Instead of playing, it is breaking at the same time with the seriousness of the game and with the shield of hypocrisy. The fact that seems to be playing with fake weapons he kills with real weapons; the fact that seems to be playing with imaginary lives he disrupts the real lives of those around him. Pretending to pretend is the destruction of fiction: the final pirouette of the nakedness of evil. The laughter of Trump and his followers strips all the losers of humanity and brings them to the gas chambers every day.
Children, I say, take rules very seriously; This, and not naivety or creativity, is what they have in common with artists. The only adults who take the game seriously, yes, are the artists: “Make your own rules, but follow them.” An artist, while composing music, painting a picture or writing a poem, denies nothingness and hypocrisy at the same time. There are no artists nihilists, because everyone believes at least in the names, the sounds, the colors; and there are no artists hypocrites, for no true work of art hides a deeper truth than itself.
The rest of us must choose between hypocrisy and nihilism. At school, from the age of five, some play studying, playing sports, praying; adapt to a gender, imitate parents, be generous or austere or pessimistic or sunny; that is, take on a character. Others, however, impose their nothingness. A school is this definitive distribution between budding hypocrites and precociously established bullies. You just need to see our Parliament (or our working lunches) to understand that we never leave school. Kant was wrong in his predictions of humanity finally coming of age; We don’t have time to mature and reach the age of reason. There is no point in prolonging life; It would be useless to achieve immortality, as the Silicon Valley bullies claim: you die at 90 without having left the schoolyard.
The game, even if it hypocritically hides nothingness, is always preferable to impudent nothingness, even if it is much more sincere. Hypocrisy is like the empty resonance of good childhood (that of games taken seriously), which builds its palace of toothpicks and fails; the bullying of Trump (and many others), the return to a bad childhood, in which those of us who took games seriously were always on the verge of succumbing to the violence of the bullies.
Since the only alternative to hypocrisy is nothingness, it happens that when we tire of hypocrites, we demand the truth, even if this means our own destruction. Two world wars, or rather European wars, demonstrate this. Gaza confirms it. Trump, who wears a crown on his head and drops excrement on millions of protesters from a plane, is not hypocritically playing the game of entitlement, like his predecessors; It is the naked truth itself, before which we kneel in orgasm of wonder. Netanyahu, wearing the kippah and dropping bombs on Gaza, is not hypocritically defending the Jewish religion, as Zionism claims. Left; He is an uninhibited nothingness, full of himself, who rejoices in his own emptiness, happy to have a group of hypocrites who cajole him and bow before him.
Do? Let’s forget it: we can’t continue to sell hypocrisy to a world radically damaged by our games. The dilemma was posed very well by Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán in a recent and brilliant article: “We cannot criticize (Trump’s hypocrisy), as we do with traditional politicians, because he is not a hypocrite, so the obvious temptation is to respond with the same weapons: abandon the norms and adopt unscrupulous tactics, fighting fire with fire. This is the trap that Trumpism sets for us.” Europe has forced things too much, and the rest of the world, full of reason, now prefers sincerity, no matter how destructive it may be. Yes, the time of bullies is back. In reality, we are all tired of hypocrisy, but some of us – perhaps many – do not want to play the false game of lethal truth. What is the alternative? Will there be a third way? An alternative at the same time childish and mobilize? Will we be able to invent new rules without the prior triumph of death? We should at least try.
