To be a bit of a foreigner

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warned against a society divided into two camps: those who believe in omnipotence—capable of organizing themselves to bring order to the prevailing chaos (if necessary, by force)—and those who experience the deepest helplessness.

Joining the camp of the strong brings relief. Perhaps the young people who sign up for neo-fascist movements, raising their arms without shame, are in this place, in a convulsive world where absolute values have long been wavering. Faced with the insecurities that inhabit them, they refuse to suffer for the sake of others or to ask themselves questions. Identifying with a strong, seamless ideal is very useful for forgetting the uncertainties that question each person's being. Little by little, this massive identification increases the renunciation of one's own singular identity, which one does not wish to admit subjectively and which ends up being lost by merging into the collective cry, into self-affirmation as a form of ignorance. For this reason, the outsider is considered in a literal sense: one who comes from outside. They only want to know who is, like them, inside.

In the context of a political ideology that divides the world between outsiders and us, the word outsider acquires a somewhat dangerous function. Joan Coromines says that the word comes from the Latin foraneus, which means strange; hence furro: a person with a bad temper, lonely, surly. An outsider is not just someone who comes from outside, geographically speaking. It is also someone who searches for and cannot find their place. Calling someone an outsider is a way of saying that the other is—or becomes to us—strange. Sometimes we find it in the most intimate parts of the place where we live. Here the connotation is interesting. The strangest ones (or outsiders) can be people close to us: children, or a partner, who so often turn out to be incomprehensible. Even all of us, in some way, are outsiders with respect to our own history, to the extent that we become aware of it. Then we ask ourselves: who am I, really?

The young person who participates in the neo-fascist or fundamentalist movement goes against outsiders on the condition of avoiding this question for themselves. The rejection of the outsider allows for moving as a block without dialogue or nuances that might blur the horizon of force or the precariously conquered certainty.

In the same way that fascism or fundamentalism grows with the exclusion of the difference of the other, its prevention (or its exit) includes, precisely, becoming a bit of a stranger, especially to oneself, realizing that between the inside and the outside arises the need for protection and relationship, an intrinsic part of one's own vulnerability (from vulnus, wound, as the philosopher Miquel Seguró reminds us). In this urgent social detoxification program, everyone must participate: families, the neighborhood, leisure centers, school and university, the impulse of a civil society like the one we have historically experienced in Catalonia, of associationism and hiking, of choral societies and scout groups, of cultural societies; spheres where everyone has a unique role without ceasing to be part of the whole.