Something has long felt off in the heart of the Eixample's golden square, where it's impossible to shake the feeling of artificiality. We've been pointing out the problems with the tourism model for so many years now, the exados And the de-Catalanization, which seemed like simply repeating the same old thing would eventually lead to something happening. But, naturally, what's happening is that nothing is happening, and what's already wrong can always reach even higher levels of misery. But the irony is that we no longer lament the destruction caused by unfettered capitalism, but rather that this destruction isn't even the famous... creative destruction. Strolling through the center of Barcelona in the midst of the Christmas rush, we experience a shift in nostalgia: from yearning for the anti-capitalist virtues of traditional Christmas, we have moved to a world where we simply yearn for a Christmas in which capitalism works.

The blackout has brought us face to face with the fragility of everything we have and take for granted. The standard of living achieved in the West (the East is getting its act together) is, in historical terms, spectacular. Of course, this doesn't negate the evidence of the inequalities and vulnerability of so many people, nor the fact that this wealth has been the fruit of brutal processes of colonization or exploitation. That said, and lest I be misunderstood, a poor person today in a democratic Western country is not the same as a poor person a century ago. Just look at general life expectancy or public health, education, and social welfare services, even if they remain limited.

Amador Fernández-Savater (Madrid, 1974) is a journalist, philosopher and author of Libidinal capitalism (NED Editions), a book in which he analyzes the relationship between capitalism and desire and addresses the malaise, precariousness, and acceleration of our times.

This is an old dilemma that has endured through many historical vicissitudes, in which the excess of one of the two poles of the equation has generated problems of coexistence. Although digitalization generated a certain resurgence of the spirit and meaning of cooperation and sharing (as expressed in the case of Wikipedia), the truth is that the hegemony of competitive logic, the essence of the capitalist economy, is very evident, and with the arrival of Trump and his followers, it has become overwhelming. In our country, in recent months, and as a result of the debate unleashed by BBVA's attempts to take over Banc Sabadell, the word and the concept competence They have reached levels of a totalizing paradigm. It's not normal for banks to talk to each other through all kinds of media, and for the debate/dialogue about their future to fill, through advertisements, newspaper pages or many minutes of television time. The issue, obviously, doesn't only affect the shareholders of both banking entities, but I don't know if the scope it has ended up having was imaginable.

The tendency to bury our heads in the sand is as human as it is universal, but the more informed we are in the era of the most scientific and technical knowledge we have ever experienced, the clearer it becomes that closing our eyes to reality is only a childish device to postpone a problem blowing up in our faces.