Exclusive! It is no longer possible to be a good person

BarcelonaI imagine that even at El Mundo they have regrets about the treatment they are giving the Ceuta crisis (sensationalist headlines, dehumanization of migrants, etc.) that they have felt obligated to seek a philosophical justification to keep their conscience clear. The person in charge of such a difficult mission has been a writer named Juan Diego Madueño, who clings to the change of opinion of a socialist deputy from Ceuta, who in 2024 said that the immigrants were "children" and now says they are "invaders," seasoned with interviews with three philosophers (the unavoidable Victoria Camps, the over-the-top libertarian Javier Sádaba, and the newspaper's own columnist Jorge Freire) to reach the conclusion that being a good person is a relic of the past: "The Ceuta crisis and the death of do-goodism: 'It is the religion of idiots'."

The first thing that draws attention is that the phrase in the headline, which is Sádaba's, does not appear in the text. The Basque philosopher says that "do-goodism is a secularized religion, a way of ignoring the big questions." Here it is evident that someone's hand slipped in search of an easy click. The author dives into data on crime to justify why people have now stopped being "naive" and gives examples such as the socialist prime minister, Mette Frederikssen, who in her youth criticized anti-immigration policies. What the piece basically comes to say is that there is nothing wrong with considering immigrants a danger or enemies, and that this does not make you a worse person; on the contrary, you can continue taking communion peacefully every Sunday because empathy is overrated. And in a pirouette worthy of the best trapeze artist, Sádaba says that, in reality, do-goodism is conservative and not leftist. Talk about a mess.