Is Trump killing democracy? Are we witnessing a crime in real time? In a few decades we will need a historian Carles Porta to elucidate the dark plot? Are we still in time to avoid the tragic death? We shed light on the darkness. And what better light than that projected by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and company three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, when they taught us the joy of reasoning, thinking and feeling in freedom, when they instilled in us confidence in progress and science.
We delve into the mystery of the past with the help of the writer Martí Domínguez, who has compiled an anthology of wisdom from those enlightened people, The light of lights (Editorial Angle). Please read the collection of revealing quotes that I have chosen thinking about what the current tenant of the White House is doing and saying, probably the least enlightened American president –both in knowledge and spirit– since the independence of the USA.
"The happiness of America is intimately linked to the happiness of humanity; it will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, honesty, tolerance, equality, and tranquil liberty," wrote the Marquis de La Fayette in the American press.
"One does not feel like a liar when one is accustomed to being one," said the playwright Pierre de Marivaux (1732).
"It is generally easy to conclude that the men most disposed to be wicked are usually the most inclined to conceive the idea of a terrible divinity, and that, at the same time, they have imagined in this frightful idol almost the same inclinations as men in blood, in blood," 4 Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, a utopian who proposed abolishing property. How does Trump imagine the God he believes saved his life in the attack on the electoral campaign? [He himself described what happened: "Blood was spraying everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe, because I had God with me. I should not be here today; if I am on this stage it is thanks to the grace of almighty God. true from false, good from bad, beautiful from ugly, everything seems to conspire against him." Madeleine de Puisieux (1720-1798), writer and feminist, friend of Diderot.
"We often put people at the head of the government whom we as private individuals would never have allowed to run our business." So wrote Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thriroux de Arconville, a novelist, translator and chemist known for her study of the putrefaction of plant and animal matter, in 1760. Now the putrefaction that concerns us is another: that of democracy.
"History is a long and monotonous compilation of the misfortunes of man, and too often the panegyric of public delinquents, for that is what the criminals can generally be called." heroes", according to Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau.
"The friends of truth are those who seek it and not those who boast of having found it," according to the mathematician, philosopher and politician Nicolas de Condorcet, 1791. He also wrote that ans" (1794).
"Discord is the greatest evil of humanity, and tolerance is the only remedy," wrote in 1764 the combative Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence, according to whom tolerance "is a tolerance"; let us forgive each other our stupidities, it is the first law of nature."
And to finish this little tasting: "Opinion is the queen of the world, because foolishness is the queen of fools," according to one of the maxims of the lucid and moral skeptic Nicolas Cham.
