We spoke by video call because it is impossible for him to move from his house in Utrera, Seville.
She is, for now, free of the cancer for which she is receiving immunotherapy, but she has just "peed" on a kidney stone that has had her "fucked up" for several days and she feels "as if she had given birth" after "having a very fucking time".
That, removing tacos from each sentence.
David Pastor Vico, Vico for his students, readers and followers, does not mince words.
Nor on both sides of his skull, under his black samurai bowknot.
On his right, a circular scar reminds him every day in the mirror of the operation he underwent and that he lives thanks to science.
We will get to the disease that almost killed him, but we had arranged to talk about his "practical philosophy book" dedicated to young people and adolescents.
Her twins are three years old.
Will it serve them in the turkey age?
Ortega y Gasset used to say that generations follow each other every 15 years, but that the big changes are every 30. That is why grandparents love their grandchildren very much, even if they do not understand them.
I hope that when my daughters get blown up it will still be a good read for them.
I don't get to my granddaughters, fixed.
Is it harder to be a teenager today than it was when you were?
Yes, because today it is difficult for them to integrate into a group naturally.
We were lucky to have urban tribes, that social networks did not exist, that we did not have cell phones, that there was no Instagram, and we had to go out, walk, ask questions, have fun, develop social skills no matter what.
That is essential at this stage.
Today, teenagers are spread out in an immense ocean looking for each other, wanting to smell each other's asses, like since the beginning of time, but asses are very far away and very isolated.
They feel what human beings have always felt: anxiety, depression, uncertainty, and they don't know how to deal with them.
My book can help you.
How terrible are the networks?
I don't know if they are so terrible, the problem is that we don't know them, and the boys think they know them, but they only do it mechanically.
If even its inventors are banning their children from screens and want to return to analog education.
They are not the devil, but we do not know them either to affirm the contrary.
At what age will you let your daughters have a cell phone?
I don't have it planned.
At the moment, I don't even let him play.
When the time comes, right off the bat, it will be one of those call-and-answer only.
They will be the laughing stock of their class, but they will say that their father is weird because he is a philosopher, and if they get annoying, he will come to school to give a lecture and, perhaps, they will convince the other parents that don't let them either.
And you're not afraid they'll be fodder for bullying?
Bullying is not a problem of self-esteem, but
of
socialization.
Not from someone who assaults.
Bullying
occurs because there is no group that defends one in particular
.
My ambition is for my daughters to play with everyone, interact with everyone and, if I don't give them my mobile, they can tell the rest that their father is like that, and they respect them.
I too was an outcast as a child.
For being a nerd, for being chubby, for being weird.
But I had social skills, and that saved me.
Approaching a group of people.
To heavy-metal, in my case, who saved my life in various complicated episodes of my youth.
Without friends we are nobody.
Friends make us up, they are part of us.
There is no humanity without friendship.
Who does not have friends is not human?
Those who do not have them do not know the damage involved in not having them.
He is like a blind man who does not see the sky, but he imagines it in his own way.
No, he forgives, if you can't see the sky you don't know how it really is.
Friends are your authentic personal heritage.
The tragedy is not having friends and believing that they are not needed.
What is loneliness?
Unwanted loneliness is a disease and a sentence.
Of course, the sought-after solitude can be satisfactory, but the unwanted solitude makes us sick and can kill us.
In fact, when we want to punish someone, we put them in jail, and if we really want to screw them over, we isolate them.
Do young people suffer more now than before?
Are they glass?
It may be, but it is due to a distortion of how they perceive themselves.
That is why it is so important to know yourself.
If I am clear about my failures, and my good things, of course I will have bad spells in studies, in the family, in life, but I will be armed.
But if no one has told me that this self-knowledge cannot be done from solitude, that I am not the only one in the world to whom this happens, I will be the fodder for the evils of the spirit.
I say know yourself, not settle.
I hate the "be yourself", the "who follows it, gets it", the "if you want it badly, it will happen".
If you don't know yourself and you don't act, shit doesn't happen.
We are very small and we are at risk of so many things.
Look at me, I've spent the whole fucking week pissing a rock.
But you always want to save your children suffering.
That is in our nature, we are the only species that wants to take care of children for life.
And the law of life is that they fly, and let them fly.
The problem is when the children stay until they are 40 at mom's house and we are happy on top of that.
What would you say to a lady who suffers from an 'empty nest' because her 25-year-old daughter leaves home. It's for a friend.
I would tell him to fuck more [laughs].
Seriously, she would tell him to be happy because her baby flies and to fill her life with other things.
It's still easier to fuck than to find a friend.
It is very probable.
Thanks to the change in morality, sexual issues are taken as a natural thing and there are applications that help.
In my time it was much more difficult to cast a
quiqui
.
Now it is difficult to make friends because we have given ourselves so much importance, shitting as we all shit, because this is important to say, that the fear of failure or rejection prevents us from getting closer to others.
Or bad experiences.
In that I always say the same thing: if a dish makes you feel bad, you don't stop eating;
Well, damn, if a friend betrays you, keep trying until you find it.
Why do you speak so badly?
Larra said that there is no bad word given but only badly taken.
My language is very flowery because I need to establish an immediate connection with people, and sometimes a taco communicates more than a hundred subordinates.
When a philosopher says "poop" instead of "excrete" he is doing humanity a favor.
David Pastor Vico, at the Atocha-Almudena Grandes station in Madrid.
On the right side of his skull you can see the scar from his melanoma operation.Bernardo Pérez Tovar
He has told that he has cancer and that he lives by a miracle.
How did she find out that she had it?
Combing my beautiful waist-length curly hair.
One day, at 45, I blew up a mole that I had since I was a child.
I started to bleed a lot, I was cured and, within a week, I had a tumor as big as a mushroom.
I freaked out
I went to the dermatologist.
Six millimeter implantation melanoma.
With one, you can heal yourself.
At six, you're pretty screwed.
And more with an irradiated ganglion, as he had.
The statistics go down to six months of life, a year and a peak, at the most.
Did you shit then?
Downside down.
I left the office and made three calls.
One, crying to my wife.
Another, to my father, in Spain.
The third I got myself together and pulled contacts.
I passed all the phases of mourning in that half hour.
They told me I was late and to run.
And I ran.
They operated on me in Mexico and they left me with this scar, like the bottom of a Coca-Cola can, and the worst part is that my hair won't grow back there, because it's a skin implant from my leg.
The operation was a success, but afterward, the alternative was immunotherapy and he couldn't afford it in Mexico.
I had to go home.
It turns out that the Spanish public health system keeps me alive in a hospital next to my childhood home.
I was born in Belgium because my parents emigrated to be able to eat.
I returned to Seville at the age of six.
I emigrated to Mexico because in Spain I didn't have a job as a philosopher.
The National University of Mexico invited me as a professor and, when I already imagined that country as a home, I have to return home to be able, literally, to stay alive.
I'm a survivor.
Sell me your book.
It is a tool not to be happy, but to not suffer.
It is not a Satisfyer, nor a Lexatin, because that is fleeting and the philosophy remains.
Raise ideas that can change your mind, your way of thinking, and if it changes your way of thinking, it changes your way of living.
I don't say it, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus says it.
Are the classics still so alive?
A good philosopher, good philosophy, can save you from going to the psychologist, it can save your life.
And that bothers a lot to many.
If I don't say it, I'll burst: philosophy seems boring because many teachers are very boring.
Ancient philosophers divided philosophy between analytical and curative.
There were no psychologists or psychiatrists, the doctors healed the body, and the philosophers, the soul.
Our mind has not changed that much.
Why are we going to invent the black thread if it has been invented for two thousand years?
What is the future for you now?
A possibility that has been given to me.
I've had such black days.
I have been so scared that I live each day as a gift.
I also live in Seville and that is priceless.
To be an emigrant, that's where the irreducible Sevillian has come out.
The best land in the world.
A great honor.
A VERY 'HEAVY' PHILOSOPHER
The philosopher David Pastor Vico (Namur, Belgium, 46 years old) does not seem like a philosopher.
He does not, at least, to the preconceived idea that one has of them.
His high bow on his skull, his prophet's beard, his leather jackets and the black T-shirts with his message bring him closer to the urban tribe that, he affirms, saved his physical and emotional skin during adolescence and youth.
And it is that Vico, as he is known, especially in Mexico, where he is a professor at UNAM, is, he says, "very heavy."
The son of a humble Sevillian family that had to emigrate to Belgium, Vico dedicated himself to giving classes and lectures in auditoriums and on the Internet, until a melanoma changed his path and he had to return to Spain.
Now, he launches
Ética para distrustados
and collaborates with the program
La hora de Sonsoles
, from Antena 3. Any medium is useful, he says, to try to avoid suffering for people through the word of the classics.
"Happiness," she says, "is something else."
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