The swamps of nostalgia

In 1688, the 19-year-old Swiss physician Johannes Hofer presented the thesis Nostalgia medical dissertatio, oder Heimwehe to explain the feeling of sadness experienced by some soldiers while on the front lines, far from home. It was the first time the term had been used. nostalgia, created by the young man himself from the Greek words uswhich means return, and algaePain. The sorrow of the soldiers who longed for their homes and surroundings was also concentrated in this German word, Heimweh, which unites, Heimhome, and Weh, pain.

Nostalgia isn't a particularly negative feeling, but lately there's a kind of nostalgia that certainly is. The kind that yearns for a dictator who died exactly 50 years ago, but whose lingering presence can still be felt. tufThanks to a Transition that was neither exemplary nor a model of democracy. The emeritus king says that his legacy is having given Spaniards a democracy after 40 years of dictatorship, as if it were his merit to have worn a crown placed on his head by the dictator of thetied up and well tied"And it was all so well tied up that the Bourbon descendants continue on the throne 50 years later, and in that country, a person can walk around the little hen And to sing facing the sun without the full weight of justice falling upon them. Because even before Franco died, there was already nostalgia for Francoism, and because that nostalgia has never stopped appearing in the media or being whitewashed with the idea that "life was better before." And it certainly was. If you're a Francoist.

That almost 40% of young Catalan men (aged 18 to 24) confess that They wouldn't mind living in an authoritarian regime It means many things. Experts talk about a disconnect with democracy because they feel that democracy hasn't helped them, but democracy also failed to seduce those of us young people who were born at the end of the dictatorship and would never have said we wouldn't mind living in a totalitarian regime. Perhaps because we experienced the dictatorship through our parents and grandparents and because, when we were young, we swallowed the idea of the Transition as it was sold to us, without digesting it, directly reading it in The Country and culturally enlivened by the Spanish pseudo-left and the tomato-flavored Catalan Greenpeace. It is also significant that young women today do not largely think the same as young men, considering that in totalitarian regimes they are the first to be deprived of all freedoms and that the latest wave of feminism, even if it has brought about substantial change, has directly touched many consciences. Hence, also in part, why many young men are bothered by the freedom of women who women A democracy.

Be that as it may, there are people who feel more nostalgia for what they haven't experienced than for the memories of what has already happened to them. Nowadays, so-called neo-fascism, which is like the old fascism but of today, is full of nostalgics who are not old enough to have lived through the barbarity that authoritarian regimes entail. One must have done quite wrong to not have been able to prevent this nostalgia from becoming the shadow of the world. And indeed, there are those who have covered themselves in glory. But at the same time, it is inevitable to wonder if it is entirely utopian for human beings to feel nostalgia only for what is good for all of humanity. The answer is obvious.

That is why we also feel nostalgia for utopias. Because the alternative is not to do things wrong again. It is better to do them right.