“What is the Enlightenment?” Kant asked himself in 1784, and replied: “It is man’s emergence from his minority, of which he is guilty. Minority is the inability to use one’s intellect without the direction of another.” And he launched his famous appeal in Latin: Know aude! Have the courage to think, to know. The biggest obstacles he saw for this were laziness and cowardice. I read this quote in an article about the compelling desire we have to interpret everything and know its meaning (how funny, this is just another example). But we’re not talking about the dark matter of the universe, but about Rosalía’s latest video and things like that, and how happy I am not to be in Spain and not have to endure the sidereal embers of the next few months. The label “explained ending” abounds, as to why a film or series ends this way. This happened before with 2001: A Space Odyssey and little else. You stayed listening to Pumares until two in the morning to see if you understood anything about that damned monolith, and the worst thing was that the next day you couldn’t repeat it during recess. If you already think I’m a who prospers Now his head will explode: to quote a success from back then, I can’t imagine the discussion that would be created today about the possibility of writhing between picapica powders, the first thing that came to the G Men’s mind that rhymed with “girl”. Today the expectations are much greater and what has changed is the worry of whether or not I will think in the right way. Above all because debates are created for any nonsense, since the discussion is already the product, it generates money, and even more so if it is aggressive (this perversion would leave Socrates himself speechless, defender of dialogue in search of truth). You don’t dare think, for fear of making a mistake and being scolded. There will already be people asking ChatGPT who to vote for.
The curious thing is that as the level of public debate drops, in this fog of opinion in which we need guidance, as minors, there are prominent personalities who ignore what is right. This is no longer a given, it is always under discussion. The scandal is portable, you take it wherever you want and, above all, it goes where it has always been. Let’s look at two current examples for adults. Israeli military advocate general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was arrested for releasing a video showing Israeli soldiers torturing a Palestinian prisoner. Among other things, they stuck a knife in his anus. Netanyahu won over half the country by accusing him of causing “the greatest damage to Israel’s image since its founding.” Regardless of his personal modesty, given that the record would be his, it is pure sophistry: what’s wrong is what the video shows. The other example is the Norwegian pension fund, the largest in the world, which until now applied ethical criteria to invest. For example, since 2023 it has left 43 Israeli companies and the American Caterpillar, because its machinery was used to demolish buildings in Gaza. But this week the Norwegian Parliament suspended these exceptions, or scruples. His finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg (yes, former NATO secretary general), explained: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the current guidelines could mean the exclusion of some of the world’s largest companies.” Like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, he specifically mentioned. That is, if the most powerful companies are amoral, what needs to be corrected are the criteria of morality. “The world has changed,” he explained. In the opposite direction to the Enlightenment. And this would be the explained ending.
