Abejas sin fábula

What is culture? asked the naive. A garden without latrines, replied the witty one. Thanks to this beatific vision of culture, we have built a capitalist world that exudes transparency, empowerment, authenticity and humanitarianism. The languages we use to talk about ourselves make us a kind of angel of democracy. And this without, while we conceive ourselves culturally in a mirror as flattering as that of equality and diversity, we stop acting as interested creatures who work, consume and, ultimately, practice the rituals of turbocapitalism. Today this tension between our two souls is barely a muffled echo that does not raise any suspicion. It is as if culture and capitalism, historical enemies for a long time, had merged in the nirvana of the cult of the self, this declines in the mediocrity of interests or in the sublimity of feelings. Faced with this somewhat dumb anthropology, one could insist, with Bernard Mandeville, the dazzling author of The Fable of the Bees, that we cannot be innocent in prosperous societies. That is to say, that moral idealism, even that of democracies subjugated by the religion of culture, sentimental activism and the preaching of empowerment, finds no place in routines and social activities ruled by the private vices that capitalism greases.