Albert Einstein said that “if the Moon had consciousness, it would be convinced that its rotation around the Earth is free”. And humans? We have elevated our condition above that of the other inhabitants of the planet, consecrating as a reference for our way of being in the world the ideal of the Enlightenment: the ability to think and decide for ourselves. But day-to-day life makes it evident that we are far from meeting this standard; we are a species articulated around power – the difference in potential contained in any relationship – and the abuses that derive from it. And, if Voltaire is right when he says that “humans have no remorse for the things they are accustomed to doing”, there is still a lot of ground to cover. We must be very careful. Reinhart Koselleck put it more sophisticatedly, in the story of a German doctor's dream: “After the consultation, around nine in the evening, I lie down on the sofa with a book about Matthias Grünewald, and suddenly my room, my whole house, is left without walls. I hear the loudspeaker noise: by decree, the walls are removed until the 17th of this month.” The paradoxes of the human condition: without walls there is no freedom, even though walls are the most common instrument for isolating the citizen and leaving them without space to make their own. Translated to the present day, Ulrich Beck put it more prosaically: “We are heading towards a state authoritarianism that, on the outside, will adapt to global markets and, on the inside, will behave authoritatively.” We see it day by day. And the proof is that every day there are fewer democracies and those that remain are ossified, in societies that do not even have the impetus to stop the penetration of the far-right.

"Freedom is incompatible with democracy"It seemed like a joke from the Trumpian universe, designed to create noise and legitimize the president's nihilism and the conviction of the oligarchs who surround him that, for them, there are no limits: they can get away with anything. But the idea is spreading with a disturbing contagion effect, as if it were meant to be the new economic, social, and communicational one.

Panait Istrati (1884-1935), known as the Gorky of the Balkans, a fervent communist in his youth, was among the first intellectuals to publicly denounce Stalinism. The son of a Romanian laundress and a Greek smuggler he never met, he was a precocious reader and a tireless wanderer. A friend of the writers Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1915) and Nikos Kazantzakis (a perennial Nobel Prize nominee), he wrote in French and was followed in Republican Catalonia. Anna Casassas, who has already translated some of his works, now signs the translation. When the sun rises (Cal Carré publishing house), a book dated 1934, a year before his death, alone and isolated in a Bucharest sanatorium. He was 50 years old and had long been suffering from tuberculosis.

"It's hard to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and where the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins," says one of the many phrases I've underlined from The freedom to be free, of Hannah Arendt (Linden, 1906 – New York, 1975). This is a compilation of three articles published by Eumo Editorial, translated by Laia Font i Mateu and with a prologue by Fina Birulés, slightly ahead of the 120th anniversary of the political philosopher's birth, which will be celebrated next year.

One of the most recurring and passionate social debates is the extent to which we are free to make our decisions. Was the choice of vacation destination in the most fashionable Eastern country made freely? Fashion—which, in a strategy to disguise its coercive nature, is now called trend– Does it curtail our freedom?

"If society relies too much on AI to think, it could end up losing critical skills. It's not so much that AI will replace human intelligence, but that humans will stop exercising it." This is what AI tells me when I ask if it will one day replace human thought.