La casa del ahorcado

How can we defend individual thinking against the excess of red lines? The common projects that Western democratic societies have sustained seem broken. Not even a global pandemic can make us understand that great challenges require collective responses. Subjected to the rules of identitarianism, extreme polarization has given rise to tribal narcissism and self-referential self-absorption. Collectives eroticized by their own identity and hostile to the rest, professional victimizers and exclusive nationalists dominate a panorama where it seems justifiable to eliminate the rights of people in pursuit of a greater cause. The House of the Hanged Man is a devastating and controversial essay that looks at the effects of the culture of sentimentality on freedom of expression and analyzes some of the most alarming manifestations of our retreat towards the tribe. With an anthropological perspective, but without academic intention, Soto Ivars offers us a journey through various contemporary cases of a return to taboo, sacred horror, the scapegoat, heresy and ritual punishment, and proposes the restoration of the concept of citizenship as the only way out to the civil war of identities.