This first day of 2026 is the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. What if we took it as the beginning of the return of the Unconquered Sun, as a successful example that, if we Enlightenment people do it right, we could experience a new spring?
If I am writing this article now, it is because I am alive, and if you are reading it, it is because you are also alive. This is not a trivial observation. In the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, I am one of those who believe that this is the only life we have and, therefore, we must make the best use of it.
You and I may be more broken, poorer, or more alone than we were some time ago; We are surely very concerned about the failure of reason and humanity that we are witnessing urbi et orbi, but hey, we continue here. And that’s already a victory: all our family, friends and colleagues didn’t make it, we had to say goodbye to many of them.
I’ve never been one of those people to make new life resolutions in the New Year, and I’m not going to do it this time either. My goal for 2026 is to stay alive and healthy. Be careful, in this formula, the kick is important, as you know. We want the rendezvous with death to catch us alive, that is, to enjoy the many wonderful things of existence and fight the bad guys at the same time, without truce or quarter. Gallop, gallop, until they bury them in the sea, right?
We are currently going through the winter solstice, the most difficult time of the year, when the days are shorter and the cold more intense. But our wise Roman ancestors already celebrated these dates, which they called Saturnalia, as the beginning of the return of the Unconquered Sun. Yes, my friends, these days, the darkest of the year, mark the birth of a new period of light.
It is significant that some of the most vitalist writers in human history suffered from chronic illnesses. Perhaps it was their illness that made them place an exceptional value on existence; like so many cancer survivors, we now joyfully enjoy waking up to a new day.
This was the case of Nietzsche, who wrote The Gay Science “in the language of a thawing wind”, insisting from the prologue on “the victory obtained over winter, this victory which is coming, which must come, which has perhaps come…”. And this was also the case for Albert Camus who, in Return to Tipasa, expressed this wonder: “In the middle of winter, I learned that an invincible summer lives within me. »
Yes, Javier, but these are difficult times for poetry, don’t forget that, some of you will tell me. I don’t forget it, no. I am well aware that obscurantism and barbarism are very fashionable at the start of the second quarter of the 21st century. That they triumph on both sides of the Atlantic by proposing to the masses the law of the strongest as an alternative to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity of 1789. That the Enlightenment of the Enlightenment has died out in recent decades, replaced by the brilliance of senseless videos on Tik-Tok. This is all true and you and I suffer from it. But who said that the game was over, that this freezing winter would last forever?
I remind you that this first day of the year 2026 is also the day of the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, one of the most important metropolises on the planet. I think that the fact that a young immigrant of Muslim origin and socialist ideals won the local elections in the Big Apple is one of those very good news stories for the year 2025 that Isaac Rosa spoke about here. What if we took it as the beginning of the return of the Unconquered Sun, as a successful example that, if we Enlightenment people do it right, we could experience a new spring?
I am not a Leninist, I am a libertarian and federalist. I do not believe that relevant and lasting changes are made from the top down, but on the contrary from the bottom up. In the heart of this cold winter, I feel that the reconquest of cultural and political hegemony by progressives must begin in the cities. Let us make the districts of the metropolis and the cities of the regions bastions of resistance to barbarism. And from there we grow. Forget the assault on the Tsars’ Winter Palace, which ended badly. Why not explore Mamdani’s new path? From local to universal.
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