Keys to face the challenges of a polarized and emotional society

The ideal archetype of a human being for 2023 could be, about more or less: a person at peace, happy in a world without wars or hunger or thirst, nonchalantly healthy, confident in the reasoned and honest arguments of their politicians, mentally stable in a planet clean of fossil crap, noise and pollution.

But the sad reality, alas, it has been very different in 2022 and it will most likely continue to be so in the year.

Several experts analyze in these pages - and outline priorities and remedies - some of the essential challenges of the imminent future.

Of the future that is already here.

War in Ukraine.

The hope of peace?

The war of all wars and the theme of all themes.

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin confirmed that the most fearsome thing about the great satraps is that his pulse rarely trembles and he unleashed his first missiles on kyiv.

He had started the invasion, which he preferred to call a "special military operation", and which was nothing more than the second chapter of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.

It is the largest armed conflict in Europe since the wars in the former Yugoslavia (1991-2001), with the result of more than 6,000 civilian deaths (United Nations figures for October, although US General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of The USA has come to speak of 40,000 civilian victims and 200,000 military victims) and 14 million Ukrainians displaced inside and outside their country.

“We face the second year of the war with the hope that peace will arrive in 2023 and that it will be in favorable conditions for kyiv”, explains the journalist Lluís Bassets, former deputy director of EL PAÍS, member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. and the Elcano Institute and author of books on geopolitics and international relations such as El año de la revolución.

How the Arabs are overthrowing their tyrants or The goose of Mr. Bush.

“The invasion has failed.

The Russian Army has shown an ineptitude that has surprised the whole world and Putin has achieved the opposite effect to what he was looking for when declaring war.

Many of the conditions that usually exist to declare an armistice will probably occur in Ukraine at the end of winter”, analyzes Bassets, who touches on another key point: “We will have to see the capacity of the United States,

But in practice, the definition of the future will in any case be determined by the events on the battlefield, clarifies Lluís Bassets, who draws these possible scenarios: “If Russia manages to recover the initiative for the first time, something improbable, Zelenski would be doomed. to open dialogue and probably to make territorial concessions.

In the event that the balance is maintained and the fronts even stabilize, an indefinite armistice without a definitive peace cannot be ruled out, of the type that the two Koreas signed in 1953 and that is still in force.

On the other hand, if it is the Ukrainian Army that continues advancing and recovering territories, the most hopeful scenario of peace talks favorable to kyiv will open up and, at the same time, the most dangerous of a nihilistic and desperate reaction from Putin, that is to say ,

A Ukrainian inspector examines a Russian missile that fell in the town of Bohodarove on April 25, during the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Yasuyoshi Chiba (AFP / Getty Images (AFP via Getty Images)

The mental health of young people.

More media, more collaboration, more surveillance

Suicide rates skyrocketed among adolescents, new pathologies that have emerged as a result of the pandemic, disorientation of parents and educators in detecting symptoms... The World Health Organization estimates that the increase in affective disorders, depression and anxiety disorders have increased among 25% and 30% worldwide in terms of general population since the pandemic began.

But within this population, the segment of minors, mainly adolescents and young adults —between 12 and 29 years old—, has had an even greater increase in this type of ailments.

For Dr. Celso Arango, director of the Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the Gregorio Marañón General University Hospital, confinement was a clear risk factor.

"And in fact," he adds,

“If we refer to Spain, one of the great challenges is to have a ratio of professionals —child psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, mental health nurses dedicated to children and adolescents…— much more in line with the countries around us.

We also have to provide mental health care services closer to where the complications occur, for example interventions that can be carried out in educational and social centers outside hospitals”, explains Arango, president of the Spanish Society of Psychiatry.

A recent Unicef ​​report states that every year 46,000 adolescents commit suicide in the world.

Celso Arango is clear: time cannot be wasted.

"We must put all the measures within our reach, including a national plan to reduce suicide, and specifically in the youngest segments of the population."

And he has little doubt as to which is the absolute priority: the early detection of symptoms: “Work in collaboration with pediatrician colleagues, parents and legal guardians, who never have to trivialize any alarm symptom.

It is not normal for a child or adolescent to talk about death or suicide and to look for information about it on social networks”.

Fight against climate change.

Clean energy as an urgency

The disappointing results of the recent United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el Sheikh (Egypt) and the impact that the war in Ukraine will have on environmental action in the face of the eventual "every man for himself" political- energy mark the current state of affairs in the fight against climate change.

What are the challenges, the most urgent emergencies facing the new year?

“The most urgent thing is to work to avoid the tremendous impacts that we have suffered this summer.

The climate crisis has intensified natural catastrophes in the summer of 2022, causing unprecedented destruction from Pakistan to Mozambique, passing through Spain, China and South Africa.

No region of the world has been safe from floods, heat waves, droughts, fires, tornadoes... It is urgent to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and anticipate risks", explains Valvanera Ulargui, general director of the Spanish Office for Climate Change .

Ulargui is committed to "a positive agenda hand in hand with everyone, administrations, companies and citizens", for which the deployment of renewable energies, energy efficiency,

The head of the Climate Change Office is clear that the war in Ukraine has exposed the great vulnerability of economies around the world due to their heavy dependence on fossil fuels.

“It has been seen that the solution to these crises, the volatility of the fossil fuel markets, the fragility of the supply chains, in addition to other incipient crises that are not dominating the front pages of the newspapers, but that put the The current development model, such as the biodiversity crisis, has a common thread and a clear answer: replace fossil fuels with clean energy”.

Climate action should not be the subject of political debate, but an electoral year is starting in Spain where everything will be possible,

including the rise of denialist speeches from some benches in Congress.

Although Valvanera Ulargui is optimistic: “Despite the highly polarized debate in Spain on energy and climate policies, there is an overwhelming majority of Spaniards, 83%, who believe that climate change is a threat that must be combated urgently.

70% support measures such as regulating or limiting energy consumption, restricting car use in cities or increasing taxes on the most polluting activities”.

Employees of the Hoshinoya hotel in Tokyo, in a demonstration of the Lantern Dining Experience system, to protect clients without using an anticovid mask.Phiilip Fong (AFP)

Covid-19.

Living with the virus and with those who come

At street level, the question is in the air: have we finished with the covid?

The feeling is that yes..., but only at street level.

From a scientific point of view, everything indicates that the virus is still there and that we better learn to live with it... and with those who will come.

This is the opinion of Ana María García, professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Valencia: “Of course the virus is still there.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for this pandemic, is not going to disappear or stop infecting people and transmitting among the population, and this may be the case for a long time.”

The appearance and spread of new virus variants may affect vaccine effectiveness.

And although the vaccines are effective with the variants that have emerged, vaccination coverage is very uneven and especially low in some parts of the world such as Africa, as this accredited epidemiologist explains: "This shows the lack of will to address with equity the global problems that affect our world.

Inequalities in the distribution of health problems and in the distribution of interventions to prevent or assist them are also common for the vast majority of diseases, both globally and locally”.

Another of the challenges in relation to the pandemic is to extract certain lessons regarding the relationship of human beings with animals and with the environment.

"We know perfectly well," he points out, "that human mistreatment of other living beings is an open door for new infections to appear and new health problems to be generated in our species, sometimes in the form of pandemics."

Ana María García refers, among others, to the recent United Nations report, which stated that modern plagues such as the one caused by covid-19 are a foreseeable result of the way in which human beings grow food, trade and consume animals and alters the environment.

Will we have to get used to a covid flu?

“Well, yes, the virus will continue with us and may even resemble the flu.

Then we will need surveillance systems like the ones we have for the flu itself, we will have more vulnerable groups that we will have to protect as we do with the flu, with periodic revaccinations and other precautions.

Among them, of course, should be included the need to seriously reconsider our care for the elderly according to the current model of residences”.

Violence in parliamentary speech.

Congress, a film with two diamonds

A deputy in the use of the word alludes to the intimate relations of a minister and her partner.

Days later, the same minister accuses the first opposition party of "promoting the culture of rape."

Verbal delicacies such as "fascists", "filoetarras", "pedophiles" and "coup plotters" resound in the rostrum.

The chamber is a shameful five-ring circus, and although the situation has not yet reached that of parliaments such as those of Senegal, Taiwan or South Korea - where it is customary to settle differences with smacks - everything will work out.

Recently, the thinker, writer and director of the Juan March Foundation, Javier Gomá, proposed, on his Twitter account, that the two diamonds with which television in the 1970s warned of dangerous content be recovered for parliamentary broadcasts, with the warning:

"This program contains scenes of violence and uses lewd language that could offend the viewer's sensibilities."

Gomá, author of the

and winner of the National Essay Award in 2004 for his book Imitation and Experience, reflects on the avalanche of outbursts in parliament: "Parliament is the site of what Habermas called 'the ideal of undistorted communication', but instead of that we find a disastrous spectacle not suitable for minors and highly not recommended for adults”.

There is today, from broad sectors of the citizenry, an identification between this unbreathable tone and the growing feeling of boredom with the political class.

Will all this end up influencing a progressive distancing of citizens from the polls, in an election year like 2023?

Goma is not clear.

“If some politicians behave as they do, it is because they think that their coarseness contributes to their electoral success.

None of them have had a sudden attack of energumenism, that's for sure.

In this parliamentary barbarity there is a very precise political calculation”, he explains, convinced that today Parliament is a hostage to political extremes: “Faced with the bipartisanship that pragmatically seeks the center and appeals to the common sense of the majority, the extremes tend to be extraordinarily moralizing and binary.

The insult,

The water problem.

A human right in check

Globally, one in three people do not have access to safe drinking water and six in ten lack access to safe sanitation facilities.

According to data from the World Resources Institute (WRI), 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to basic drinking water, with Mozambique, Niger and Chad being the most extreme cases of scarcity.

"The most serious and urgent problem is the real materialization of the human right to water, a problem more related to poverty and water contamination than to the absolute scarcity of the resource," says Leandro del Moral, professor of Human Geography at the University Seville and member of the New Water Culture Foundation.

Del Moral warns that, although in the case of Spain this situation does not occur, the unacceptable living conditions, without water or sanitation, of some settlements of immigrant day laborers in areas of intensive agriculture or in some urban peripheries cannot be ignored. nor the cuts of water to certain homes for non-payment of the rate due to socioeconomic circumstances.

Emergencies for the new year in the Spanish case?

“From a strategic perspective”, maintains this expert, “it is necessary to redefine the role and dimension of irrigation, this is one of the most serious and difficult political challenges facing Spain within the framework of the European Union.

Water for agriculture must be redistributed with social criteria.

It is essential to prioritize the resource towards non-speculative models of social production”.

Drought in Galicia: the river Miño, as it passed through the town of Portomarín (Lugo), last August. Óscar Corral

Political polarization.

The practitioners of tribalism

The progressive degradation of language in the Spanish Parliament is nothing but a direct consequence of the progressive process of political polarization.

In different books and articles, the writer, thinker and teacher Adela Cortina has evoked two traits that today largely define what the political class is and its discourse: the emotional and the disjunctive.

"There has always been polarization, but its exacerbation has to do with networks and the media," says the professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the University of Valencia.

"Those of us who have studied these issues know that there is a biological predisposition to tribalism, to defend what is mine against what is outside."

To the author of books such as

(National Essay Award 2014) or

was very surprising for him to learn that there are professional polarizers who make a career encouraging people to convert that tribal predisposition into an attitude towards life.

“They are true specialists in reinforcing the friend/enemy scheme that we all carry latent, and, unfortunately, we are verifying that this effort to antagonize people is very successful and that is why they are hired, to polarize.

Some are looking for votes, money or simply to earn a reputation.

Adela Cortina assures that we are in an emotivist era: "It is easier to handle emotion than reason."

She goes from there to the insult as an effective substitute for the argument, despite the fact that she is convinced that "in general, society is not polarized, it is not, and it cannot be that the networks and the media insist on polarizing us."

Democracies versus autocracies.

Dangerous (and seductive) forms of authority

We asked Daniel Innerarity if he fears the rise of autocracies like China or Russia;

illiberal democracies such as Hungary, Turkey, the recent Brazil of Bolsonaro or the United States of Trump, or, in a generic way, what could be called “non-democracies” capable of —how to say it— “fix things for the people”.

His diagnosis: “In this context, the idea of ​​dispensing with 'democratic formalities' to recover a form of authority that does not waste so much time on sterile discussions or is so tied to the logic of electoral deadlines may be seductive.

To this temptation one can succumb to the left or the right, with a technocratic or authoritarian turn.

The professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country and author of essays such as

(National Essay Award 2003),

or

warns about the danger of trivialization and verbal shortcuts.

“Those who defend liberal democracy,” says Innerarity, “would be very wrong to think that we were dealing with half the population that had suddenly turned fascist.

More sophisticated analyzes are required: carefully examine the fears and frustrations of the citizenry, understand the extent to which workers who trust more in authoritarianism than in the old union action feel unprotected, wonder what we have done to promote so much disaffection towards politics even in those whose only hope should be that the policy works well.

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