Abstract

Traditionally, from a standard leftist position, selfishness has been rejected and demonized as part of a capitalist ethos. Latin American critical discourse has inherited this interpretation from revolutionary junctures and progressive transformations of the region's political regimes. However, current reality demands that we embark on a series of critical anthropological considerations about the concept of selfishness (of the "Self") to understand the new flows of political dynamism, especially digital, that will define humanity's fate in the coming decades. The most intimate dimension of subjectivity must be re-examined without prejudices to comprehend the current claims of new generations and to not be left out of this dizzying and passionate history.

Introduction

We conduct a reflection on the invisible substrate upon which our social reality rests, especially in the historical moment we are currently in, which is characterized, on the one hand, by intense innovation and technological-productive diversification under the form of capitalist production, that is, with the “logic of value enhancement,” and, on the other hand, by the re-reading of traditional values and practices that for the first time can be understood from a virtual globalization of subjectivity in which it is being reconfigured in all dimensions of life: in politics, education, culture, medicine, recreation, sexuality, etc. Capitalist Modernity has produced a type of subjectivity from its productive acceleration, which includes, above all, an unprecedented level of consumption where the subject finds a domain for affirming their being. In pre-capitalist times, the reproduction of life identified consumption and production of signs of distinction. That is, there was no real possibility of having “something of one’s own,” much less displaying it. Clothing was determined by social hierarchy, as were all other aspects of life. With the advent of capitalism, the working classes were able for the first time to acquire certain objects that they could rightfully call “their own,” thereby increasing the illusion of possession. The 20th-century Western, particularly North American, expanded and promoted the multiplication and diversification of objects to unprecedented levels, intensifying an unparalleled “symbolic exchange,” which, in turn, implied a certain way of life, a promise of liberation for all subjectivity, at least in the possibility of “being,” always at the edge of “class discrimination” (Baudrillard 1989, 3): [It is about] the advent of the new culture of the individual that celebrates the desires for autonomy, personal fulfillment, and expression” (Lipovetsky 2015, 71). The excitation of the senses, of personality, in a consumption that would allow reaching a “power” never tolerated by the religious or aristocratic elites of the past. Initially, fashion, music, cinema, or television “were for everyone.” It is undoubtedly an anthropological-formative moment of social consciousness (situated subjectivity) that includes various levels of socialization, but above all, a new emotional, psychological consistency of human subjectivity that would be configured in various ways until it could express itself best outside the codes established by the communities of origin. It is true that people still work to eat, to survive, but it is equally true that this has transformed (metabolé) in such a way that work is no longer fixed, nor does it fix subjectivity in one single way: like the old slave at the service of the owner (although some manifestations of slavery still exist in extremely unequal and poor societies). In any case, work, that is, the need to reproduce life, has managed to detach from natural time and immerse itself in a virtual temporality that makes it more dynamic and complex. Work now intersects with leisure time (as “concern” or simply as “wasting time”). This leisure time has further expanded in various societies, but particularly in ours. We are talking about a leisure that is totally different from the otium cum dignitate of a Cicero at the height of Roman culture. Rather, we express a dimension of life played out in a pleasurable reading of the world, which is not an escape from reality but rather a realistic strategy to face the enormous contradictions and disappointments of inequality. 

Method

The European philosophy of suspicion (with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) spoke to us about the emergence of the “mass” as that formless and homogeneous group that is determined in a reactive, atomized, sickly manner, prone to dementia and fanaticism, to the annulment of the self (of the person or individual in the strict sense). But this “mass” that has appeared at certain moments of political crises (with fascist delimitations, primarily) is not a univocal result of the hegemonic mode of production; rather, it has also implied (as its reverse) various analog forms of resistance to the univocal modernizing logic. This is seen especially where deeply rooted popular traditions are in constant reading and re-creation of what is constantly produced by capital (at the level of the formal market, but especially in the informal one, which is more our regional context). Between the “modern” and the “traditional,” we increasingly appreciate the formation of voices and identities that demand to be themselves. Unleashing a tension between the local and the global from a new way of producing and realizing oneself. In such a way that media manipulation (which still comes from large corporations) is not absolute, but has various shades, appropriations, and reactions in the contexts where it is introduced. The effects are not anticipated or predetermined. The concept of “selfishness” can be very useful for interpreting the complexity of existential positions in the virtuality of the contemporary world (which is increasingly developing in the southern hemisphere). In this sense, it will be necessary to see to what extent one can speak of a “rehabilitation of subjectivity” that can assert itself in a way that allows for a more authentic and full movement of human actions in community, facing the ever-present threats of control, dominance, and manipulation. The reconstruction of subjectivity begins by indicating that it is as pernicious to have a community above subjectivity (which always ends up without voice or project) as it is to have subjectivity above the community (which always ends up without unity or future). We will explore this at the level of a decolonial anthropology of our Latin American reality.

From Selfishness as Illusion of Property

At the coercively mediated level of everyday language, we are presented with an antagonistic dichotomy between “selfishness” and “altruism.” The usual, initial definition of “selfishness,” which, notably, in popular Mexican usage is not called selfishness but “envy” (as in: “you’re so envious!”), is employed from an early age and can be roughly stated as: “the propensity to privately enjoy a certain good.” But the apparent “confusion” between these two words, “selfishness” and “envy,” does not imply a mistaken form of expression but rather holds a secret of modern society. We are dealing with a natural play of meanings in the use of speakers, but one that we can problematize. If envy can be considered as the feeling of frustration resulting from not having or enjoying the goods, attributes, or qualities of another that are considered valuable in a given totality: the tailored suit for someone who only has work clothes; the assured health of some while others are sick in the street; the talent for someone who has not produced a work; youth for someone in the mature years of life; the successful company compared to one that has been destroyed in competition; the more flexible job position compared to one that is too rigid, etc.), the selfishness that is often talked about goes through the same sieve, that is, the current state of property: the fact of having power over something, someone, and oneself. Selfishness is a mechanism for procuring the means to ensure one’s own identity in the face of a hostile and disadvantageous environment; envy is its correlate. The more power the self has to dispose of itself and its surroundings, the more envy it will arouse in others. It should be noted that this mechanism is the most visible of all: the radiant splendor of the very act of possessing, observed from a keen eye that, in the chiaroscuro of daily life, assesses class position and levels of subjectivity realization in relation to others: how am I and how are others; who am I and who are others. This can be traced back to the origins of humanity in relation to goods that were scarce and subsequently to the epic task of becoming worthy of receiving the blessings of divinity and building the hero’s image immortally. We are talking about an éthos (as social disposition of character) that is formed and transformed in a struggle scenario where it is considered a duty to preserve/realize one’s own identity, singular or collective, in the face of another (internal to the community: the adversary; or external to it: a common enemy) that represents the threat of dispossession. In capitalism, war, as well as its “refined” form, competition, is the plexus where the appropriation/use/enjoyment of goods is activated and intertwined (constantly separating the “ours” from the “theirs,” the “I” from the “we” and the “we” from “you,” not only in terms of goods bought and sold but all kinds of cultural, racial, or spiritual goods at stake), always under the coercion of a dominant group. This character is typical of capitalist modernity “[where the human being] is subjected [...] to a metaphysical version of himself in which he exists, but as an economic value that self-valorizes” (Echeverría 2016, 32). This “metaphysical version” always operates in all circuits of communication and exchange, especially today where versions are produced, reproduced, and circulate in vertiginous ways. Although, we add, this operation is neither linear nor univocal, but finds new expressions, creations, and reconfigurations of that same “metaphysical version” that may eventually lead it to other boundaries.

The Selfish Ethos, at first, “struggles” to give itself the good that, immediately through its action, if it is effective, is consumed and denied in its possibility of common appropriation/use/enjoyment. This leads to the division between those who have and those who do not… between those who are and those who are not. Hence the more subtle questions deep within the psyche: Why do they have and we do not? Why have they “advanced” or “progressed” and we have not? However, it would be a tremendous mistake to essentialize this ethos in the way modern liberal thought did with that fictitious “state of nature,” where selfishness and “the war of all against all” prevailed. Enrique Dussel (2007) has shown that such a hypothetical scenario must be considered as the absolutization of a specific moment of the social that always implicitly carries with it a “contract,” in which the survival of “oneself” can never be understood without the institutional recognition (with official or dissident legitimacy) of the other members of a group or community (even betrayal can be understood in this framework, where one may betray a neighbor, breaking the fidelity offered in times of stability, in view of a greater good to be enjoyed privately; thus, greed and even usury are also explainable).

Returning to the thread of reflection, the everyday selfish person may be one who enjoys not so much the good “in itself” (to satisfy some immediate need) as the socially recognized value in the concrete good (which would be the “benefit” for which one struggles) and whose fulfillment can only necessarily mean the frustration/defeat/failure of another who will be deprived of that good, a frustration that is nothing more than the recognition of the self’s factual impossibility of appropriation, use, and enjoyment, and which we can recognize by the name of “envy” (which could well be termed, in a “well-versed” language, as “admiration”). What is accentuated in this process is poverty, barbarism, emptiness, corruption, illness, and death: the accelerated wear of the social homeostasis where the self seeks at all costs its opportunity for realization. Therefore: envy, as can be seen in everyday assertions and judgments, especially in societies of inequality, would be the dis-realization of a collective phantasía (image) before which few are truly “destined” to fulfill and the consequent resentment harbored in a selfish psyche that, in a more or less tolerable struggle in such ravaged societies, would desire for itself the good that in the end was achieved by another, which I will call here “fulfilled selfish” (which can be realized both in the new shoes of a classmate, or the latest-generation PlayStation of a neighbor, or the luxury house of a wealthy person, as well as the medicine that another can obtain through their social security or the full religious practice of another community of believers), being this the social being that is the true image (patent, real) that is yearned for and desired to be realized. Unfolding at every opportunity an illusion of progress, ascent, and prosperity that, however, is not realized all at once but to a certain extent in each private or public, formal or informal, legal or illegal, virtual or real dispute, of certain mediations that promise abundance. In any case, this dynamic of deprivation or dialectic of everyday alienation fuels its fire precisely because it does not aim to fully meet human needs, but only postpones them in limited and controlled doses of realization, recognition, pleasure, frenzy, happiness, coveted doses constantly sought by those who desperately need them. Faced with the reserved privilege of a few, misery is enjoyed only once without greater pretensions and with the available resources that in communities with indigenous roots assume a support network for the enjoyment of finitude here and now (drug trafficking is that opposing position or force that stems from a bitter resentment translated into emulation of dispossession, the reproduction of torture, and murder to achieve a dominance equivalent to other existing forces, erasing any alternative).

Therefore, the envious person envies not so much the things themselves, as we said, but the “power of ownership” imposed on others in the consumption of certain goods, manifested in the lifestyle of the fulfilled egoist who is “seen” for his exhibited demeanor. Nietzsche spoke of the resentful Christians, the archetypal envious, who reversed the values of the Greek aristós and became beings consumed by the terrible frustration of having imposed on themselves rules of non-appropriation/use/enjoyment of the lofty goods that would bring about human excellence and superiority, the exuberance of the Will to Power. The figure of Christian asceticism, according to Nietzsche, would be nothing other than the harmful and painful suppression of properly human, “natural” desires, resulting in a bland, stagnant, and decadent life, sickly. This figure is what we might call representative of envy (with which we validate the Basel thinker’s fierce criticism of Western Christianity, but not of the original messianic movement that arose with the presence of a certain Yeshua of Nazareth). Envy, therefore, would be nothing other than the acceptance or, rather, the resignation to the private use of goods by those who, through blood ties, tradition, seduction, force, luck… have achieved the confirmation of structural inequality before the failed (though avid for possession) face of the one who envies; a perverse dialectic that, nevertheless, makes clear to both the fulfilled egoist and the envious an “impossible horizon,” a dangerous, absolute evil: the common appropriation/use/enjoyment of all goods.

Thus, the envious person is clearly the unfulfilled egoist (we might say, in potential) who hopes to achieve the collective fantasy of private appropriation of a social good and whose greatest expression we are suffering today at all levels of the world of life. But what does the communal form of all goods imply? This “absolute evil” for a system of inequality was formulated long ago by one of the first messianics who followed the call of a crucified man: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, as anyone had need” (Acts 2:44-45). What kind of dialectic is being drawn here? An open dialectic of cooperation. We can also read elsewhere: “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17). Or even much earlier, in Proverbs 11:24: “There are those who scatter, yet increase more; and there are those who withhold more than is right, but it leads to poverty”. We are drawing on the biblical research of José Porfirio Miranda, a Mexican Jesuit philosopher who made denunciations of the infidelity/contradiction/corruption of the Catholic Institution (and especially of the neoliberals who call themselves “Christians”) from his incendiary work, which includes notable titles such as Marx and the Bible (1968)[1] and Communism in the Bible (1981), and which is part of the theoretical production of the renewing Liberation Theology that emerged in our region in the late 1960s. How can we forget his categorical statement made in the second book mentioned: “Pántes hoi pisteúsantes (Acts 2:44): that is, all the believers, all those who had believed in Jesus Christ, all Christians. Oudé heiís (4:32): not one said that anything was his. Hósoi Ktétores (4:34): those who had fields or things, those who had something. If they wanted to be Christians, the condition was communism” (15). The message is clear: the revelation from the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible condemns exploitation, dispossession, and abuse against the needy, against the poor, promoting, especially from the New Testament, a radically different type of sociability that does not involve the private retention of goods under the coercive control of the State (whatever it may be), but is achieved precisely through the just distribution of goods with strict oversight of meeting the vital needs of all. This is the opposite of the exegesis undertaken by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This idea of communism is what Miranda defended vigorously at the beginning of his critical work in the face of a threatening climate (even of death) and is the idea that guides us in rescuing sources that can contribute to building a new mode of social relations in the future.

Several questions arise at this point in the presentation: Does this biblical form of common appropriation belong to an archaic moment of the social or is it a living reality in the dynamics of many existing communities that practice a series of rituals of abundance following the commandments of justice and equity preached in the aforementioned sacred texts? How is the “logic of use value” actually defended in the different societies of inequality? What remains of the so-called “modern spirit” in the appropriations and analogical processes of consumption in the zones of non-being? As with the realized egoist, it is unthinkable that the lords of global capitalism will admit structural changes, but could the modern spirit stimulate the crisis and thus update the best of its tradition within the framework of new forms of life? In this sense: what would be properly modern? Does modernity have a “core” solid enough so that the processes of phagocytosis carried out by societies of inequality in their daily lives are merely unidimensional reproductions of their valorization of value, or, on the contrary, does it lack such a core and is it at the mercy of unimaginable scenarios of re-creation from a multitude of contexts and realities, especially in the global south? In short, we will delve into these concerns at another time.

We have indicated that in everyday language, egoism is associated with envy, and we have initially shown that this relationship is not a confusion of terms but a statement of constitutive principles of our form of social reproduction: the realized egoist essentially corresponds to the being who envies his separation from the rest, and the being who envies has been imposed, by the polemos of consumption, the promise of well-being by the realized egoist in the permanent illusion of the capitalist system; both are the two complementary ethical moments of the same exercise of legitimization of a social totality that operates from the violence of dispossession. Nietzsche did not overlook this but rather denounced it in all its aspects, as mentioned, in the message of the messianic praxis of early Christianity, which results from an economic and political diagnosis in search of the root of the social problem.

The relationship between egoism and envy is, in sum, a closed dialectic of dispossession within the prevailing totality. Here, it no longer matters whether the good being competed for is appropriated/privatized in a “legal” or “illegal” manner; a prominent businessman fearful of the legal framework is no less egoistic than one who engages in drug trafficking. Perhaps for the naive success discourse, the egoist of pater Rockefeller is more deserving of admiration/envy (as a “virtuous life example”) than “El Chapo” Guzmán (although he may also be an example, but for the exploited and dispossessed classes, of “low culture”). However, while they both operate within the private form of appropriation/use/enjoyment of goods, egoism is their defining ethos, their character, manifesting, of course, this form of struggle at unprecedented levels of hoarding and dispossession, one doing so with the support of the law and the State, and the other in clear insubordination to positive law which aims to regulate the social conditions of dispossession. Nevertheless, the second social actor, the drug trafficker, may operate in the shadows of the order, exploiting the fissures in governmental institutions for their benefit, fissures created by the very realized egoists in power, whose ambition has proven insatiable and who are the first (and therefore most dangerous) to attack institutions and legality. In an effective Rule of Law state, it would not be possible to offer on a “silver platter” information, resources, and infrastructure for the emergence of one of the most significant and elusive figures in the history of drug trafficking; in the trap of financial capitalism, all opportunists slip through. It is therefore natural that our country is the birthplace (in its double sense) of this popular figure pursued and captured by the law, as well as the most successful (“legally” speaking) business figure of the last decades in the financial world: Carlos Slim (comparable to Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk). Both figures represent the fantastic but at the same time real and operational culmination of all the aspirations and social imaginaries that carry in their hearts resentment, that is, the acknowledgment of dispossession that pushes one to keep fighting at any cost, doing whatever it takes, driving all social relations in a sinister direction.

There is also another common way of treating egoism, but which does not stray from the aegis of property, namely: “the inability to think about others and focusing on one’s own benefit.” In light of what has been presented here, this approximate definition can be understood. When speaking of “benefit,” reference is made to the privatization of a good, while the expression “inability to think about others” should be interpreted more as that acceptance/justification of dispossession (of goods and work time) which has denied others the right to also enjoy such goods and which, in principle, implies a disregard for fulfilling the needs of other members of the social whole, that is, organic indifference to general welfare. Is this where the ancient commandment “thou shalt not steal” might be better understood? Does this commandment imply more the protection of common goods that should not be privatized, thereby contributing to the ruin of the whole community, rather than the protection of those who have over those who do not have? Perhaps a key to understanding this is time. Marx, speaking of the contradictory but necessary relationship between the bourgeois “free time” and the worker’s “non-free time,” may offer us a clarifying formulation. The realized egoist is, above all, the one who possesses the “free time” to enjoy existing goods produced by others. The egoist, in these reflective terms, is not the one who longs (like the envious), but the one who exercises their “temporal power” over others (from one class over another, from one gender over another, from one body over another, from one race over another, from one people over another, from some groups over others) through the objects/symbols they consume and appropriate. Those who work are subjected to hours of exploitation that prevent them from realizing for themselves the enjoyment of the bourgeois free time (which is exercised by going to the cinema or theater, engaging in sports, taking piano or dance lessons, reading the classics, or simply spending time with their family, which, it should be noted, is also related to them as property). Therefore, it is almost customary (a common place) for the worker to long for the benefits of being a boss (and, in our case, the industry that has most played with this aspiration is the soap opera industry), which can be updated at any time. What this means is that they seek to have the time to be a property owner; property over something or someone is not measured in money, but in the ability of someone to hoard, retain, and dispossess certain goods over a period; that is, to have power over them. This would be to have the lifestyle of the exploiter (with its consubstantial rites, values, activities, dress, etiquette, lobbying, etc.). The code of private property, of the polemos of dispossession, pervades all operational circuits of a class-divided society, such that the realized egoist represents the most patent evidence of the “effective progress” of a mode of production governed by the capitalist form, which in turn manifests itself in multiple ways through the ephemeral glimpses of enjoyment that marginalized classes can procure for themselves, such as limited access to the internet, cars, television, cable, refrigerators, telephone lines, potable water, housing, clothing, food, etc., and which serve more as these doses or “advanced” proofs of a greater well-being never attained. This dialectic is also exercised with race (the white person flaunts their whiteness), gender (the ideal of an athletic and professional woman), or religion (being a spiritual preacher): to have (time) to possess is to be the one aspired to.

Here lies the farce of capitalism (and of Modernity?). The “guarantee universalism” seemed to offer the “socially resentful” the opportunity to finally enjoy the sweet life of the bourgeois mode of living, of the owner as such, but in the end, what it contained was precisely what occurred in the priestly asceticism criticized by Nietzsche, that is, the corrosive pressure of the overlap of images of the owner/holder/bourgeois which, over the decades, seemed ever more distant from realization… leaving only a resentment whose consequences are visible in a terribly violent and empty everyday life like ours; the envious remain trapped in a “promise” whose radiance makes it impossible to glimpse alternative ways of being, living, or creating a life they can proudly call their own. Thus, it is understood why envy (unfulfilled egoism) truly sustains the class-divided social order, the dominant form of which today is capital. The problem is not, therefore, as Marx said, that the bourgeois cannot imagine any social form other than the bourgeois, but that the great historical flaw is that the envious, the dispossessed in “waiting” to possess, themselves, in their frustration are disempowered to imagine themselves in another possible reality without pain, expropriation, and violence. To imagine! To dream! Represent, after indignation (the moment of negative diagnosis), the highly positive element that opens horizons. It is obvious to think that a few, the “owners” of most of the resources/labor in the world, do not aspire to “sell their goods and share everything in common”; but while the exploited do not see the possibility of recovering those goods as “theirs-as-commons” (and not private, that is, not in the egoistic form of property), the dialectic of property will continue demanding victims as sacrifice, that is, dispossessing goods and resources from the vast majority of people who live in waiting, in expectation, that is, in the envy of the realized mode of egoism, and who are being annulled in the jaws of Moloch. The real danger of the continuation of capitalism, understood in these terms, lies precisely in the mass that envies and maintains with its complicity (legal or illegal) the lifestyle of the high and middle hoarders; the man or woman who wants to excel in this totality must learn from childhood to strip their peers, using them as means/time/goods/merchandise to fulfill their predatory appropriation, forgetting themselves in each phase of the value valorization, freezing in the endless work, in the lack that is not repaired. What is at stake is the integrity of human subjectivity, its capacity to give itself a full life.

Taking the Self as an Alternative Opening

So far, the reflection has led me to uphold a certain idea about egoism viewed from the principle of private appropriation of qualities or goods (which is the horizon of private property in capitalism as such). Both realized and unrealized egoism are governed by the ghostly power of the illusory promise of power over oneself, over others, and over all things, with both figures being necessary moments in the reproduction of our social order. But beyond this determination of egoism (in act and in potential), is it possible to conceive of an egoism that does not have as its foundation the social division into classes and the dialectic of struggle? Is it possible to speak of a self that can form itself in such a way that it is not a victim of the tricks of dominant powers that use it for the benefit of a mere entelechy of power and death? How to imagine an anthropology that recovers the individual for their own benefit in contexts of extreme hostility and domination? Or is the self-doomed to the pathological narcissism of contemporary relationships? Here are some considerations.

In traditional leftist political theory in Latin America, subjectivity has been given prominence as the revolutionary instance of the historical changes that are sought to be established. This subjectivity has been defined as a historical “subject,” sometimes as the proletariat, sometimes as the people, with both being configurations of social blocks that can perform a certain political function. Thus, this “subject” had to necessarily include a wide range of groups, collectives, classes, and, of course, until the end (or perhaps at the beginning?), flesh-and-blood people (as Unamuno liked to say) who were attracted and required by the movements that called them. The individual lost himself or herself within the block to which they belonged. The leaders were a few, while the vast majority were anonymous faces whose specific needs were simply absorbed by the discourses and moments of conjuncture. But who were all of them? Blocks, mediations for the struggle; in the end, individual subjects, biographies ignored in the clashes of historical forces. Although we cannot say that this happened in the same way for everyone in different countries, as each social process of resistance and struggle had very distinct configurations. There are people who still fondly remember some leadership in their homes that truly contributed to securing and promoting life; there are also testimonies of having been part of a movement for reivindication because there was no alternative. But we speak here of the vast majority of anonymous people from the countryside and the city who simply continued fulfilling the obligation of working in whatever allowed them to support their homes, returning to the reduced confines of production and exchange. We speak of people who have remained on the margins of official histories, and who from time to time are called to feature in moments of change. Their history is also the history of Our America. A deep history that runs beneath all the political spasms: the naked biography facing its own reality, a reality that has not changed much in recent centuries. For how much has the life of the peasant from the Mexican Revolution really changed compared to that of the peasant of this century? How much has the life of the tianguis merchant changed over the decades? But above all, what of their lives has been objectified in the march of history? Is their anonymity the price to be paid for power struggles? Some things have changed, but everything remains the same for those who still lack the basics for their subsistence, those who, like before, must strive to avoid succumbing to despair. It is the new generations that have changed with each cycle, especially the youth. More due to technological innovations than to educational plans or national projects (let alone the lost decades of neoliberalism). But people have practically disappeared in the construction of their own history. Social networks, for the first time, have offered the possibility of personal expression that can call, animate, persuade, debate, etc. It is true that manipulation exists, but technical mediation has allowed individuals of all causes, who were always anonymous, to be in continuous expression of themselves from any place through what they are capable of reading, meaning, thinking, creating, producing, exchanging: they communicate themselves with a unique style. They make themselves seen, felt, heard, desired. For the first time, there are no longer leaders who speak for them, media that use them to capture a photo for an official or corporate statement, or testimonies to suit. Each person, from their unique and intransferable life, shows with complete boldness (though also with discipline) their steps through the world, their feelings, and their aspirations. In this new context, we have the obligation to take reflection in new directions. Contributing to the individual well-being of the people who are now driving the changes (not merely a specific class or an articulated set of classes or factions). Now we can think of some points for discussion.

In Enrique Dussel's philosophical thought, we can see how throughout his research he focused on the “exteriority” of the Other as an internal transcendentality to any system or totality of practical fields established in a specific territory and time: “being human is essentially an intotalized” (1974, 167). This, of course, stemming from his reading of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. For this European philosopher, the absolutely Other remained in an immeasurable distance. It was an ethical mistake that was questioned by another interesting European thinker: Paul Ricoeur. For if the Other is absolutely Other, how could one come to know, speak to, or live with it? The community and communication simply disappeared. Dussel also questioned this Levinasian mistake because it was incompatible with Latin American politics. For the Argentine-Mexican, politics is thought of as an effective service to the people and the poor. Thus, for Dussel, the Other was the poor (a theological figure, but above all, an economic one), the oppressed people, the victims of the capitalist system. In this anthropological approach, Dussel has promoted throughout his works a dimension of subjectivity (of the self) as a being re-sponsible for the misfortune of those who are not. But this approach leaves us with concerns. Who is the “self” responsible for the Other? Is it a part of the excluded people who can take charge of others? Is it a progressive elite that can overflow generosity from its position of privilege and commit itself to the poor? Is it the good Samaritan who helps creatures in situations of helplessness? It seems that this figure of the “self” comes from those who have an advantage over those who are in stark disadvantage and impotence. Because the ethical demand applies to a self that can engage in the rescue of others. But the ethical demand does not apply to a self that is in a marginalized situation because this “self” is assumed to be completely powerless and without any strength: it is pure weakness. Therefore, the idea has not been considered that the self or the self from which an ethical imperative can arise might be in conditions of vulnerability, but that from itself it could be recovering in dignity and freedom. That is: what can the individual do for and by himself? Isn’t self-care a sine qua non condition for achieving an authentic openness to the open wounds of others? How far from a “self” that can save or liberate is a “self” that can learn to live without fear, anger, and despair? For Dussel, the needy always seem to be condemned to that situation unless someone (that strong and benevolent “self”) does something; the “you” is an impotent and always passive figure through which history ends up running over in its name. But when the “you” is liberated, it always seems to happen through external movements that end up abandoning it to its fate from time to time (with honorable exceptions). Besides risking one’s life and freedom. Beyond the relative victories or clear defeats, singular faces are once again lost in the gloom of social tremors. Where has subjectivity gone? Where has courage, pride, and valor gone? Where have desire, dreams, and memory gone? Where is the family, the complicities, and friendships? Much has been lost in great feats. But those who return are left with a palm of noses in solitude, in the tremendous tribulation of day-to-day life. Definitely, the “you,” that is, alterity, is, above all, a yes to oneself. An identity that cannot be returned or exchanged. Suicide is possible, but that is still a taboo for some bourgeois stances, whether progressive or liberal.

In his mature work on politics, Dussel indicates: “Subjectivity is identified with human corporality; the experience ‘from the skin inward’ (from a physical, neuronal, psychic, intentional point of view) is the realm of subjectivity” (2009, 98). This is the Self or “I” understood as a unique person with a biography. But “Subjectivity (the self, the conscious, the unconscious, etc.) has an intersubjective constitution, as it always occurs among human relationships (the father, the mother, the extended family, the neighborhood, the school, etc.); relative determinations” (99). Thus, there is subjectivity, but it is traversed by a multitude of institutions through which the self is formed from its early years until death. It is true that all subjectivity acquires its specifically human dimension through the relationship, position, and function it occupies in a given society (child of whom, the family to which one belongs, the language one speaks, the people or nation to which one belongs, etc.), in the “here we are.”[2] No one chooses to be born in a particular place, to their parents, or their time. But, while we may accept that this is a fact of life, this intersubjectivity is problematic in itself. Because not always are we children of someone who has cared for us (as in the case of the tremendous writer Mary Shelley); because not always is the family a safe community of realization; because not always are we educated; because often we are only over-exploited or enslaved labor in a given nation. Positively, subjectivity is always intersubjective, but this does not mean in any way that this intersubjectivity is of much value. Negatively, there is a hostile, violent, indifferent intersubjectivity. Hence all the possible consequences. It is here that our anthropological approach leads us to affirm that it is the very intersubjectivity that needs to be rehabilitated, especially in societies of inequality. Liberalism has posited that at the origin of every social contract is an isolated individual (Self as solus ipse) who possesses prodigious intelligence before any bond, relationship, or institution. Certainly, this is a mistake, an extreme. But the other extreme seems to be the acceptance of an “intersubjectivity” that, positively, is certainly constitutive of the human (due to our intrinsic dependence on others), but that, negatively, can be the prison of subjectivity (due to the suffering of an oppressive and absurd, pathological dependence). Therefore, the “self” remains before itself as a principle of absolute responsibility (from the awareness of the self and for the self). In this sense, what can a “self” be capable of by itself and for itself? This is what we still cannot conceptualize with the Dusselian proposal by centering everything on a “you” that appears as nothing (without identity). Because while for our liberation philosopher the human being is a transcendent intersubjective actor to any system, this is rather a way of indicating that the system or totality is not our nature, that we are not reduced to it because there may be ways to “escape” from it. There is exteriority to subjectivity. But while this may be a postulate we also accept, the burden of the everyday self is precisely the system in which it participates in an unequal position: it is its reality where its “self” is exposed to the elements. Thus, it can be said that, once again, the demand to “take charge” can only begin in the self. But how to promote, foster, ignite the intotalization of the Self? From his early works (in his Semitic, Hellenistic humanisms, primarily), Dussel thought about the totality of the social that becomes a system (in the sense that “the word becomes flesh” and in which subjectivities functionally intertwine, often under dynamics of domination); but he did not address the intotalized totality of the human person as such, in the immense richness of its inner life. This is what we propose to continue advancing.

We are interested here in Paul Ricoeur's position, who, in his dialogue with the “maximal hyperbole” of Lévinas, such as the asymmetry or moral teaching of the Master of Justice in infinite distance and the study of friendship from the Platonic and Aristotelian legacy, aims to show that the epiphany of the Levinasian Other would be ineffective, that is, without the required obedience, if it were not precisely because there is indeed a movement that goes from the “self” to the “other” as positive and human acceptance, that is: recognition: “What happens with the relationship between instruction, this admonition [from the Other in its revelation], and friendship? What immediately stands out is the contrast between the reciprocity of friendship and the asymmetry of admonition. It is true that the self is ‘assigned to responsibility’ by the other. But since the initiative of the admonition comes from the other, it is only the accusative to which the self approaches through the admonition. And the assignment to responsibility has as its opponent nothing more than the passivity of a summoned self. Therefore, it is a matter of whether, to be heard and received, the admonition must appeal to a response that compensates for the asymmetry of face-to-face... But what resources could it be if not resources of goodness that can only spring from a being who does not hate himself [as a human] to the point of no longer hearing the admonition of the other? [goodness as consideration for someone else]” (Ricoeur 2008, 196-197). This allele is, for Ricoeur, the dialectical complement through which ethics can effectively occur, as acceptance of what is “due,” as recognition of the good that must be fulfilled. But who makes it possible? The self, answers Ricoeur. Because otherwise, we could not differentiate the admonition of the Master of Justice from the executioner. To distinguish the difference occurs where the “Yes” values the moral situation, the risk, and the danger, where it can address the demand as a human demand. Addressing From another mode of being or beyond essence, Ricoeur indicates: “Paradoxically, it seems to me that it is the hyperbole of separation, from the side of the Same, that leads to a dead end for the hyperbole of exteriority, from the side of the other, unless we cross the movement –ethical par excellence– of the other towards the self with the movement –gnoseological, we have said– of the self towards the other. In reality, what the hyperbole of separation makes unimaginable is the distinction between self and I, and the formation of a concept of ipseity defined by its openness and its discovering function”. This means that the self is who can finally open up in commitment to the revelation of the Other; its openness is what is called goodness, even solidarity. Ricoeur continues: “But the theme of exteriority only reaches the end of its trajectory, namely, the awakening of a responsible response to the call of the other, presupposing a capacity for reception, for discrimination [between good and evil], and for recognition, which comes, in my opinion, from a philosophy of the Self distinct from the one to which the philosophy of the Other [a philosophy of violence and death] replies. Indeed, if interiority were only determined by the will to retreat and close, how would it ever understand a word that would be so strange that it would be as nothing to an insular existence? One must recognize in the Self a capacity for reception that results from a reflexive structure, better defined by its power of reassumption over previous objectivations than by an initial separation... And who will distinguish, then, the master from the executioner? The master who demands a disciple, from the master who demands only a slave?” (377). That is, how does the admonition of the Other become my own conviction? What has occurred here? This is what Ricoeur asks. His answer is a dialogical one that can reconcile what has been absolutely separated in Lévinas (the Self of the Other), for “dialectically complementary are the movement of the Same towards the Other and that of the Other towards the Same. The two movements do not cancel each other out as one unfolds in the gnoseological dimension of meaning, and the other in the ethical dimension of admonition” (379). The assignment of responsibility is, therefore, the self-assignment of such a demand; crossed dialectic, calls Ricoeur. The French professor finally says: “If another did not count on me, would I be able to keep my word, to sustain myself [in that word and thus fulfill the admonition to the Other]?” (376-379). The Other as absolutely other is the irrational and equivocal par excellence, what prevents us from knowing who is on the other side: is it not necessary for a dialogical process to overlay the relationship to the supposedly absolute distance between the separated self and the teaching Other?” (378). Dialogical, communication, recognition, and not merely an interpellation without anyone to listen and decide, move. Nevertheless, despite the tenacity and elegance of Ricoeur’s arguments, it must be said that this double movement is like a spring box, that is, it seems mechanical. And we continue asking: Is it through the ethical goodness of the self that we become followers of the cause of the Other as a result of “what occurs reflexively in the intimacy of the self”? Is it the realm of the “gnoseological” that allows the self to be an ethical agent, to be a person who recognizes, commits, and dedicates oneself to a struggle for the Other? Goodness in the face of the truth of the Other? Goodness as discernment between who deceives and who teaches? Reflection, or rather, self-reflection on the cause of the Other as a truth to be made one’s own? In short: what does it imply for the human to not “pass by” someone who has been violently removed from the path? For now, the self must be present for an ethical recognition process to unfold. Without the ethical sensitivity of the “I,” justice as a “general matter” or “human matter” is practically impossible.

Michel Foucault, in his class of January 6, 1982 at the Collège de France, began his course talking about the “care of the Self,” which he translated from a careful reading of the ancient Greeks, especially the Apology of Socrates, as a general rule that can be formulated as follows: “you must take care of yourself, you must not forget yourself, you need to take care of yourself […] take care of yourself, to take care of yourself and not ignore yourself” (2000, 20). For Socrates, this meant the exhortation to care for one's own soul (which can become corrupted), to live a virtuous life, and to always examine oneself. Let us not forget his words before death: “I also showed on this occasion, not with words, but with deeds, that death, if it is not a bit rude to say, doesn’t matter to me at all, but that, in contrast, I am absolutely concerned with not committing any unjust or impious acts” (32d). His life, Socrates’ life, was precisely what he had sought for himself as an authentic path and was the result of his faithful “obedience to the god” (dáimon) who urged him from within to follow a certain praxis. Foucault is right to say: “Socrates, therefore, recalls what he always said and is still very determined to say to those he encounters and addresses: you occupy yourselves with a lot of things, with your wealth, with your reputation, but not with yourselves” (21). There is a phrase that Socrates utters before his judges and in the face of the possibility of being condemned, and it is the following: “you would spend the rest of your lives sleeping” (23). “Care of the self” offers many possibilities to think from our current circumstance. How should we take care of our Self? Returning to Socrates seems extremely significant. Because he, contrary to a reductive view of his teaching simply because he was Greek, did not advocate for selfishness or pathological solitude, which were, in fact, the positions he opposed. The selfishness of possession, of vices, and the supposed wisdom (in the case of the sophists who profited from their political teaching), as well as the idiocy (which also reminds us of Heraclitus “the obscure”), are expressions or manifestations of a careless, abandoned psyche, reduced to nothing (as Kant will remind us centuries later in his apologia of sapere audé), a corrupted subjectivity. That is: social, political, and historical corruption has its origin in a soul that has depreciated itself, that has descended in its humanity. It has denied itself as intersubjective openness. Thus, we understand that the Socratic call to the “care of the soul” is an extremely relevant ethical demand for our time, in which gnosi séautón (the Delphic exhortation “know thyself”) has disappeared, as well as its humanizing meaning. Because if a person loses themselves, what can remain with authenticity, strength, vitality? Thus, they may be in an apparently good cause, but in truth, they do not have themselves, do not know what they are doing, follow the impulse of manipulation, deceit, pity, shock, anger, revenge. Thus, in the end, the good cause turns into a bad one because the person has disappeared, has lost their voice, their inner life. Therefore, the Socratic example reaches us, and we must decisively integrate it into a contemporary critical anthropological reflection. Finally, with Foucault, we formulate the most important question presented in Plato’s Alcibiades: “What is that self which one must care for, what is that I which I must care for?” (91). And an answer is given: “But the end of that care of the self, which was not the object, was something else: the city.” So, what resides deep within our interiority? What is the human subjectivity that guards from within the city itself, the very sociality? Is the subjectivity of the “Self” the space of exposure before the social fabric in which we are immersed, beset, determined? The secret of the Self lies in what it assumes or can read or learn or feel from the world of life. And this space is what must be cared for and examined with greater attention.

In a world like ours, the dynamics of terror towards large human conglomerates (both in developed and peripheral countries) compel us to notice that there is a frightened and isolated subjectivity, always summoned or requested by imposed orders and where there are no more alternatives than those presented by the very form of social reproduction. In this sense, it is important to approach the treatment of “care of the Self” and ask: how can the contemporary person take care of themselves? More research is needed here, but initially, we can say that the prevailing subjectivity maintains its egoistic core in terms of private appropriation of goods, now more pronounced than ever. This means a proliferation of dissatisfied and resentful subjectivities that await (from all social classes), through struggle and competition, to claim some benefits that the system may provide as favors, legally or illegally. There is total disregard for the human person that originates from the upper echelons of power and descends into all areas of life. The abandoned, forgotten, and despised subjectivity has nothing more than to link with others in the same condition, but whose code implies “among themselves” a certain unity, although they have lost communicative potency with other human groups, as well as general well-being. The fragmentation into groups suffering from the same dynamics of exclusion and persecution, of offense (though differentiated), makes these groups more closed, fortified, and even fanatical. It is not unusual to see a diversification of expressions communicating in places of voluntary confinement, i.e., in ghettos, but unable to coexist with each other, and perhaps only able to engage with other groups through some tragedy that moves the “hearts” (as in the case of the immolations of certain groups labeled “terrorists” by the “law enforcement forces”). The atomization of society due to “unfulfilled promises” (especially prevalent in countries where a corrupt minority has for decades impeded the qualitative and dignified development of people’s lives) has formed subjectivities that cannot recognize themselves among each other as class, fellow citizens, or even humans. Perhaps today, truly, the young or adolescents can say NO to the pressure of “family ideology,” and in this there is certainly a certain “care of the Self,” but the next step of initiation into a particular group (by traits or attributes that identify them to themselves and to others) results, at the same time, in the rejection of participation as an agent, as a transformative power of the order into which they were born: it is the emergence of a new form of life indifferent to others. The grand meta-narratives like “revolution” appear, to their eyes, as good wishes of the imagination that have nothing to do with the concrete conditions of existence, i.e., with the true, real, and unique life of each person. The vision of totality has been lost, and there is a breakdown and fragmentation of trust among people that would allow for facing the prevailing madness.

There is a form of egoism that permeates social relations under the capitalist mode of life reproduction, which we have already defined, producing exhausted, consumerist, dissatisfied, and insatiable subjectivities. Creative power has been restricted to the “virtuosity” of certain group activities (those who excel are those who have the greatest qualities to keep the groups cohesive). But political power (in Dusselian terms, for example) has become anesthetized. What, then, can be an egoism that does not involve dispossession? It concerns the “Self” as an interior/exterior openness. Max Stirner wrote a manifesto (The Ego and Its Own) to describe the restitution of the mastery of the Self, setting aside all external power that might subjugate it. Stirner wrote: “But I prefer to resort to the egoism of men rather than to their services of love, their mercy, their charity, etc. Egoism demands reciprocity (You to Me, as I to You); it does nothing for nothing and if it offers its services, it is to be bought. But the service of love, how can I obtain it? Chance will have me deal with a good heart. And I cannot obtain charity except by begging for its services, either through my miserable exterior or through my anguish, my misery, my suffering. And what can I offer in exchange for its assistance? Nothing! It is necessary that I receive it as a gift. Love is not paid for, or rather, love can be paid for, but only in love (one service equals another). What misery, what mendicancy to receive year after year, without ever giving anything in return, the gifts that, for example, the poor worker gives us! Who receives in this way, what can they do for the other in exchange for those pennies whose accumulation forms, nonetheless, their entire fortune? The worker would have more joys if the one who fattens with his laborious benefits did not exist, nor his laws, nor his institutions that he also pays for. And yet, despite everything, the poor devil still loves his master!” (1970, 209). Stirner aims to denounce the terrible and unbearable hypocrisy of the State form and its correlate, which is Society. Both try, through various mechanisms, to impose themselves on the Self to corrupt, intimidate, or deceive it into obedience within certain abstract rules of coercion. He proposes, then, the annulment of all these pressures and calls for the liberation of the Self and the pursuit of its needs; the Self has the primary obligation to care for itself and freely venture out without being disturbed by conventional demands; if it chooses to give itself, it will be for the benefit of increasing its strength. In our context, dependence on the group makes the self a vulnerable and easily extorted reality, subject to control. Stirner would denounce such a practice that arises not from sufficiency but from the fear and deprivation imposed by a totalitarian State or regime. One must liberate oneself from the compulsion of group identity, national identity! And from “oneself”: “It is I who take a stand […] I no longer humble myself before any power” (215), says Stirner. Here is a key to discernment: the contemporary self seeks refuge in atomized and restricted group entities where it submits obediently to the power of the group code, curiously because it is opposed to a “society” that mistreats and offends it; it denies a universal power to submit to a particular one with which it believes it can survive as “itself.” This will continue as long as it can withstand the pressure of the repressive morality governing the external world and demanding conformity with the capitalist mode of production. Rarely do we find groups that can live apart from the resources and services offered by the State and Society. Although there are some. But once again, this “egoism of the mastery of the Self” could be a way to ignite the dormant power of subjectivities on the horizon of the total explosion of the current social reality: a rebellion of genuine integrity. Overcoming fear and ambition to achieve an honest, full encounter with possibilities for constructing a new fabric of common life, under a new ethical demand not imposed from the outside: It is I who take a stand.

Conclusions

At the beginning of this essay, we stated that the subjectivity of the current age is extremely vulnerable. Subjectivities are overwhelmed by the dialectic of consumerist egoism in globalized capital. The masses aspire to be the figures presented in the media, social networks, and various propaganda devices. What happens to subjectivity in large cities? It is evident that we must consider which city we are talking about and where it is located on the geopolitical map. Dussel himself, in his famous work Philosophy of Liberation (1977), indicated that it is not the same “to be born in Chiapas as in New York.” The geopolitics of power traverses biographies from the origin, situating them in either misery or privilege. From the renowned Latin American Dependency Theory, it was passionately defended that the necessary other side of the progress of core countries was the dependence and super-exploitation of peripheral countries, the so-called Third World. Where and under what conditions do subjectivities arise in our era? How has their body been configured within the whole of the social order? How has the virtuality of social networks and the digitization of work changed the perception of the Self? How do situated corporealities define themselves in times of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and abandonment? How have bonds and affections been redefined in the re-reading of the world from the concerns of each individual with themselves? The market society has provided “opportunities” to create a “useful life”; the morality of hard work (the so-called “progress culture”) has encouraged following the “straight” path to a life of success. It is true that some people from very poor families managed to join the group of “winners” thanks to certain institutions (such as universities) that facilitated “social mobility,” the rise to a higher class. But all indicators show that this is an illusion, and that poverty persists or increases, and the dangers of this century present humanity with the possibility of a terrifying disaster.

Our subjectivity is not closed, although it can close; it is open and directed towards the alterity that constitutes my affective and intellectual memory. If the secret of oneself lies in the relationship I have with the Other who is not me, who is not my reflection or extension, but who is another freedom in the world with whom I can meet and accompany myself (associate, as Stirner would say), what may follow, perhaps at a much later moment, is the diagnosis that mobilizes, the collective rebellion that drives us to launch into the destruction of the current political-social order founded on the value that is valued, that is, on lack and violence. Such a response is none other than love understood as solidarity where “fear is better tamed” and where free giving (which does not use me, does not subjugate me, but exposes me to my own annulment, rather making me a fuller, more open “Self”) can lead to the explosion of structural sin, of violence imposed by private property. Solidarity and not hypocritical, suicidal altruism! An exit not imposed other than by the lack within myself and that would allow us to end the imposition that numbs and deceives all hearts. Enrique Dussel suggests that this movement can be understood as “re-sponsibility,” that is, as “taking on the suffering of my neighbor.” The pain of the other is not “their” pain but the terror we suffer from the structural lack to which the Self is just another affected party. Radical disobedience goes right to the root, and the root, Marx says, is man himself, but in the lack that he has as a “generic being,” rooted in the dominant form of productive violence. Thus, delving into structural lack makes us close, complicit, and partners in the task of confronting the explosion of the imposed order. This critical exercise of rethinking egoism anthropologically has found its secret in the abuse that an external power imposes on subjectivities and that only in shared confession can a transformative power emerge.