It is ironic that it has been almost three years since the philosopher Adela Cortina named a social logic which today defines, with worrying precision, the climate of our country: aporophobia, which amounts to the same thing, the rejection of the poor. Slowly fading over time, it went from a phenomenon to a shared narrative of our public life. This is why it is a mistake to reduce what happened in Badalona in recent weeks to a superficial expression of racism.
At the base, a rougher and more stable training operates: it does not bother anyone who comes from strength, but who needs it; This does not disrupt difference, it disrupts precarity. A migrant is accepted when he is useful and he is expelled – materially or symbolically – when he is vulnerable. The real boundary is not origin, but status. In this moral shift that transforms poverty into guilt and exclusion into a threat, aporophobia becomes a political tool that provokes the struggle of the poor against the poorest. An effective strategy because it addresses those associated with fragility, channels social discontent downwards and avoids tackling the structural causes of inequalities.
Badalona thus appears as an anomaly, as a very calculated social laboratory where he tests his speeches and his strategies for the different branches of the politics of hatred. He warns us against tectonic movements preceding an earthquake: signs of a fracture which, if we do not know how to interpret it in time, can push us towards the collision caused by the failure of a useful policy and lead us to the triumph of those who use social unrest as a populist platform which lives longer in the dramatization of magical solutions.
Because coexistence in Catalonia today is better, a fragile and still unfinished balance, supported by a dense network of people, entities and communities who, far from the media, work every day to contain the conflict. But this is of no use if the structural problems persist without being resolved: serious residential exclusion, persistent precariousness and the absence of real public alternatives.
Everything coexists with a triumphalist vision of the heritage supported by large macroeconomic figures which do not translate into a redistribution of wealth, while the cost of survival continues to increase in the face of the resignation – and the growing crisis – of a generation which has been deprived of what is more precious than that. confidence and hope for a better morning. The disconnect between institutional discourse and daily life has caused an abandonment, at least symbolic, of the working classes. For this reason, it is urgent that social leaders faced with dehumanization rebuild collective trust based on instrumental aporophobia.
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