Sexualized children's dolls and political clowns
In recent years, and we have failed to do so, citizens have watched in bewilderment as corruption cases, despite their extreme gravity, accumulate and are diluted in a climate of widespread desensitization. On the one hand, the Santos Cerdán case (with charges of illegal commissions, alleged shady dealings in public works projects, and a scheme involving politicians and companies) has once again shaken what little trust we had left in institutions and has brought to light the systemic corruption we are experiencing.
On Tuesday, a new corruption scandal erupted within the Almería branch of the People's Party (PP). The president of the Provincial Council, along with his deputy and the mayor of Fines, a town with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, were arrested for alleged irregularities in the procurement of medical supplies during the pandemic.
Despite all this, the prevailing feeling is that citizens no longer react. We're outraged for a few days, we make a big deal out of it in the elevator, we talk about it on social media, but nothing changes. We've become too accustomed to the noise and too unaccustomed to action, which might remind us of the famous title of Shakespeare's play. Much ado about nothing,in which the plot is based on a story of deceit, slander, and misunderstandings.
In parallel, another type of corruption is erupting, more moral and symbolic, but equally worrying, such as the sale of child sex dolls manufactured by Chinese companies and sold on major e-commerce platforms worldwide. The mere fact that they exist on the market and are being sold reveals the failure of digital regulation, but also the failure of our society to combat the normalization of the sexualization of minors. It is yet another symptom of a time in which ethical boundaries seem increasingly porous, as Zygmunt Bauman so aptly defined with the concept ofLiquid ethics.
These two crises, the political and the moral, share a root that manifests itself in the sustained erosion of public integrity and our collective sensibility. Faced with political corruption, we have become accustomed to thinking that not a single person escapes unscathed, an idea that has numbed indignation and diminished our capacity to demand relentless accountability. Faced with moral degradation, the reaction is one of immediate revulsion, but we often fail to loudly demand control mechanisms, sanctions, and legislative measures that would prevent this kind of behavior from reaching us as just another commodity. We are losing our Benjaminian aura because in today's capitalism, everything is a commodity.
We live in an information ecosystem saturated with scandal after scandal, where each new case overshadows the previous one before it can have a transformative impact. It's as if our capacity for shock has a limit, and we've already exceeded it, because we can't believe any more clowns. All of this contributes to a feeling of collective powerlessness. We're numb; we see that the system isn't working, that the controls are faltering, and that the institutions react late and poorly, but at the same time, we can't find the channel, the space, or the strength to articulate a protest response that goes beyond indignant commentary.
We cannot allow political corruption to become an accepted, endemic evil, nor can we allow the commercialization of objects that perpetuate harmful stereotypes to be integrated into commercial practices that feign neutrality. In both cases, the challenge is to regain the capacity to react, oversee, exert pressure, and demand real change. Resignation is, in reality, the victory of what outrages us, and if we accept it, we cease to defend not only dignified public institutions, but also basic ethical values that should be non-negotiable.
It's been far too long since we should have asked ourselves bluntly what's happening to us and what we're willing to do to fix it, because corruption is now part of our social landscape and the problem is no longer that there are corrupt people or aberrant products, the problem, ladies and gentlemen, the problem is us, who have given up.