Can there be a more perfect democracy than one that satisfies all the demands of its citizens without compromising the rights of the rest? One in which the individual freedom and desire of each of us was the great democratic mandate for society as a whole? Wouldn’t achieving this be equivalent to finding the Holy Grail that political scientists around the world are searching for in their books and articles? Is there a better ally to achieve this political state than the digital society, the power of today’s processors and the finest lines of code, programmed by the best computer engineers?
Political scientist and academic of political science from the Swedish University of Gothenburg Victor Lapuente (Chalamera, 1976) – a member of the Piedras de Papel group and collaborator of the website elDiario.es – plays on these elements in his new novel titled Necessity (Aden, 2025). But Lapointe does not weave with them a thoughtful, utopian essay on a fully egalitarian society along the lines of the one that developed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, speculating on the possibilities of the then-new network of networks that would eventually become today’s Internet.
On the contrary, this Aragonese graduate of the University of Barcelona, who holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is appointed professor at the University of Gothenburg, paints a dystopian world, overshadowed by the efficiency of computer development that governs the complexities of the so-called Western Republic The year is 2086 and is embodied in a relentless algorithm called Frida, a kind of Orwellian Big Brother made of binary code.
Under Frida’s rule, humans are freer, but also less human than at any time in the history of our species. Without emotional ties from parents or siblings or any contact with his offspring, he lives devoted to the physical pleasure of the moment. With no memory, personal history, or life story. He sees himself as a new being, freed from the yoke of capitalism, but despite his supreme individualism, he is not a willful superman in the manner of Nietzsche, but rather a weak-hearted and ignorant subject like that depicted by Robert Musil in his novel. A man without qualities.
A novel in three chapters
And now, beyond the vision of this dark world that occupies a third of the novel, Lapuente structures Necessity In three acts divided and alternating throughout the entire story. One is local, unforgettable and endearing, which shows us the adolescence of Martin, one of the novel’s protagonists, in the rural and barren Huesca region bordering Catalonia. Arcadia is lost in memory compared to what the future will bring. In an innocent and analog world, Martin and his friends imagine finding the Holy Grail which, according to legend, lies hidden among the ruins of the penultimate Templar castle in the West.
Another chapter introduces us to Martin himself in the present from 2025 to 2026, already a distinguished programmer and professor, like Lapointe, in Gothenburg, who has been seduced by a Swedish businesswoman to develop a final algorithm for an ideal democracy. Finally, the third scenario tells us the story of Anna in 2085-86, an ordinary woman from… Western Republic Who meets Björk, the mysterious librarian who will show him Frieda’s darkest corners.
Lapuente, in a phone conversation with elDiario.es, says so Necessity It’s a project that begins to haunt him in pre-pandemic times, an itch that pushes him to confront the complexity of the plot that unfolds over 460 pages. “The idea was always to delve into the extreme individualism in which we live recently,” the author comments. He adds in his explanation: “It seems that everyone is increasingly oriented, at the political level, to seeking the immediate satisfaction of their desires as a vital goal without a broader vision, and without any social sense.”
Silvio, it all started with you
For Lapointe, the current social ferment has definitively forgotten the values of society to devote itself to purely personal interest without worrying about the consequences, whether climate, democratic quality or housing. But far from wanting to fall for accusations of neoliberalism, he points to the selfish, narcissistic and nihilistic “post-neoliberalism” that he believes Silvio Berlusconi embodies better than anyone else in Italy. He comments: “The major changes in European history always come to us from Italy.”
He notes that “Reagan or Thatcher, in the context of their contempt for society, had a certain morality, even if it was due to their religious training,” adding that, on the other hand, “in Berlusconi one notices nothing but personal interest transformed into a political philosophy.” He concludes by saying: “It is the sum of individualism and hatred of society.” But he also points to leftist ideologies that, according to him, “have also become too concerned with satisfying individual pleasures.”
“I live in an ideal social democracy,” he says, referring to Sweden, “and the social democrats in the Nordic countries had a phrase that said: ‘Work hard and demand your rights.’” “Now almost all left-wing speeches talk only about rights without mentioning effort,” he continues. “Little about cooperation with society, and little about extending a helping hand,” he adds, to illustrate a lack of social commitment that he believes “can only lead to disappointment and discrediting institutions.”
This disillusionment is preyed upon by populists like Miley, Trump and their cronies, whose proposal is nothing less than the demolition of the social welfare system that has prevailed in Europe since the post-war period. According to Lapuente, populism seeks to “end all intermediary institutions.” “They don’t want anything communal or organized, just individuals who answer to no one and work with cryptocurrencies without central banks or any regulatory body” in a world where the rule of the strongest, the richest, the most powerful prevails. He adds: “We have reached historic levels of mistrust towards all state institutions.”
God as an antidote to narcissism
exactly Western Republic Which Lapointe describes in Necessity It is a version of this anti-social individualism, but corrected by the algorithm so that the currently popular populist libertarianism aligns with the maximum rights of every individual in the republic in an ideal democracy where it is not necessary to vote because Frida does it for all of us. And with much better judgment thanks to the amount of information he deals with.
So, Necessity It shows us the path our society will probably end up taking: the strait of absolute disbelief, distrust of society and the narcissistic deification of the individual and his pleasure. These wickers already exist today – they are visible in the everyday life of social networks such as “I think Elon Musk has already indicated solutions in this sense, so imagine…”, says Lapointe jokingly.
The problem, logically, as in any dystopia, is that Frida allows no alternative to what her calculations dictate: it is not possible to desire parents, siblings, stable partners, or children, from whom women are separated a year after giving birth. Do not read certain books that encourage transcendental thinking, let alone embrace religions that encourage a sense of community or moral development, as is the case with monotheistic religions or Buddhism and Hinduism. Frida’s worst enemy is condescension.
And it is precisely this religious transcendence – of primitive Christianity, which places community before faith and places an ideal and collective being above the individuality of each one of us – that La Pointe offers the heroes in the third chapter of his novel. The way out will determine either their salvation, reaching the ultimate human dimension, or their downfall when executed by Frieda’s agents. As he himself asserts, “It is a matter of making God exist so that none of us can become God.”
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