The life of the economist, politician, and writer Antoni Vives (Barcelona, 1965) took a radical turn when, in 2018, he landed in Saudi Arabia to meet with the country's prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and the team with which he was preparing Vision 2030, which was to translate into the urbanization of a region in the middle of the desert "the size of Belgium" called Neom – which integrates the words new and future– to build "a city designed for nine million inhabitants" in the middle of the desert. He has now decided to explain the seven years he spent leading that mammoth project in a memoir literary and very interesting, In the secret country (Pòrtic, 2026), which does not hide the contradictions of an absolute monarchy guided by Sharia, capable of having a journalist critical of the regime murdered and dismembered as Jamal Khashoggi and which, at the same time, has the aspiration to modernize itself. Vives's own trajectory will surprise more than one reader. In addition to winning the Crexells prize with Farringdon Road's Dream (La Magrana, 2011) and the Bookseller with And tomorrow, paradise (RBA, 2014), has been deputy mayor for Urbanism between 2011 and 2015 at Barcelona City Council —during Xavier Trias's last term— and in 2022 was sentenced to two years in prison, settled with a compensation of 155,000 euros, for irregular contracting of the then mayor of Santa Coloma de Cervelló, Jesús Arévalo, by the entity Barcelona Regional, which Vives had chaired.

Today I begin with some uncomfortable data: 25% of the adult population has suffered physical abuse in childhood, and 18% of girls and 8% of boys have suffered sexual abuse (UNICEF, 2017). Polish psychoanalyst Alice Miller delved into the concept of Black pedagogy, which she defines as a parenting model based on emotional repression, humiliation, and uncritical obedience, where violence (physical, verbal, or symbolic) is presented as necessary for education. This pedagogy not only wounds, but teaches us to justify the wound ("They did it for my own good," "The standards of the time were different"), and in this way, the pain is buried under a layer of loyalty, and the cycle of violence can perpetuate itself unchallenged.