Books should offer questions, not answers.
Okay.
It may be so.
But certain phrases, which sound nice at a literary festival or on the back of a sugar packet, become insufficient when reality appears overwhelming and disconcerting.
So we may go to a book for answers and not questions.
In
The world then, a history of the present
, Martín Caparrós proposes a fascinating exercise:
seeing contemporary society as a historian of the future would see it
who embarks on the task of unraveling the failure of a society (ours, the current one) during “the Third Decade of the 21st century”, to which he will dedicate a professional look (“alien, strange, strange”) to discover the puppeteer's threads.
That is, to look for answers or, at least, approximations.
Cover of The world then, new essay by Martín Caparrós.
The book is an abysmal journey
because it tells us, among other things, about two worlds (one of the very rich and the other of the very poor), the immense power of technology companies, extreme consumerism and the Internet empire (which "made thousands of millions of people were, for the first time in history, pieces of the same mechanism.
I read
The World then while
the images of drug crimes in Rosario
multiply
.
One in particular shocks me: the one about the kid who murders an innocent worker to spread terror.
"Now, looked at from a distance, it is evident that the dominance of liberalism had extended to violence: that private violence - the violence of citizens - had largely replaced public violence - the violence of states," says Caparrós through his character.
And he gives an example of Mexico,
the country with “the highest number of violent deaths” in the world, “where there were no wars or guerrillas or insurgent groups
. ”
Of course, the drug trafficker.
And there, his business, the production and sale of prohibited drugs, generated another:
“The growth of a protection industry
,” which “put hundreds of thousands of armed men on the streets.”
Some of whom “took advantage of it to threaten and extort and steal at the same time.”
The journalist and writer Martín Caparrós.
Photo: EFE
The fictional historian, who speaks from a century in the future with the enlightened eyes of today, points out: “In many countries, the police were the most powerful armed body: its members used to take advantage of it to impose their will and commit a variety of crimes. .
Or they resorted to a more direct method:
they threatened to neglect control of a certain territory
if its authorities tried to stop them.
Faced with the increase in violence and insecurity and citizen unrest that this entailed, those authorities used to give in without further defense.”
I return to the reality of a Rosario on fire and I feel that in the end it is true that the books sow more questions than answers, because from reading one emerges, clearly, one: could it be then that in the narco issue the problem and the solution, At least the one that is unanimously proclaimed,
do they bite their tails like crazy dogs
?