“Playing Dumb”

 

“Playing Dumb”

Notes from the Ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

 

On October 10, the fundamentalist Palestinian factions of Hamas and the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu signed a ceasefire agreement in devastated Gaza, under the auspices of Donald Trump. The outcome of this lamentable and absurd war has left more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and 1,200 Israelis killed, according to the latest reports. It all began two years ago with an armed incursion by Hamas militants into Israeli territory. From that moment on, Israel’s war machine began a systematic destruction not only of Hamas fighters but of the entire Gaza Strip and its population. Gaza and the West Bank, which represent less than a quarter of the territory expropriated by Israel from the Palestinians, have become overcrowded enclaves where the Palestinian population struggles to survive. This population has waited more than 70 years for justice and the restitution of territories unjustly annexed by Israel, in accordance with international law, to establish the Palestinian State—just as the Jewish State was established in the Middle East after World War II, at the expense of the surrounding Arab countries.

 

Today, we witness how the contradictions of capitalism and the exercise of power by Western countries, led by the United States, have enabled the sustenance of Israel at the cost of regional instability in the Middle East. Paradoxically, those who have supported Israel with weapons and money to perpetrate the outrageous genocide against the Palestinian people now pose as arbiters above the obsolete UN and its Security Council, pretending to end this unequal war between Israel and Palestine. In an even more ironic gesture, Donald Trump has requested recognition and tribute, even proposing himself as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for having contributed to the cessation of the recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the same one the United States financed and sustained through its unconditional support for the “Zionist Hitler” Netanyahu, acting as both judge and stakeholder.

 

Today’s madness manifests itself in the very cradle of “Western civilization”: Europe. In Ukraine, a deadly war is being waged for global dominance between NATO and Europe against Russia and China.

 

The world is experiencing its worst public moment. The conceptual and epistemic corpus that once sustained it now lies dead in the face of Donald Trump’s arrival, who not only discarded that Enlightenment legacy that upheld the social condition of the human being as a creature of reason, speech, civility, and ethics. The caveman emerges from the rubble of Western civilization and its institutions. The man of nothingness, the father of the primitive horde, uses all his physical and mental power to impose himself upon the species; he no longer needs the disguise of a gentleman, much less that of a rational man.

 

The Fall of Western Civility

 

The fall of Western civility is more serious than the fall of the Berlin Wall, which once sought to uphold the superiority of democratic societies over fascist and dictatorial “tyrannies.” That which supposedly distinguished us from other living beings—reason and sociability—was demolished in a short span of time, and the voice of the “id” emerged as if it had never been repressed. Thus, we witness how violence comfortably replaces dialogue, and weapons supplant arguments.

 

These are times of war, of civilizational regression, of the burial of reason. The strongest will survive, while the weakest will succumb to the vertigo of destruction and death. The orgiastic chants of the Apocalypse resound, and the old demiurge revels in chaos. No one knows the ending of this global tragicomedy: whether the popular rebellion of the economy will ultimately prevail over politics, or whether a reconstruction will be possible—not only of the moral damage, but also of the epistemic damage caused by this rebellion. Will wealthy autocrats completely replace the useless political class? We have moved from the emancipation of the working class to the emancipation of the bourgeois class, which now mirrors the true owners of the world: the economic class that is gradually governing the planet. Even Putin and Xi Jinping belong to this economic class.

Capital, Marx’s illustrious work, failed to foresee that in this class struggle, it would not be the working class that would come to power, but rather the Nietzschean ascetic turned bourgeois and then economic, who would become the true master of the world. The defenselessness of the peoples has left them in a state of shock, unable to articulate a word, unaware of this popular uprising of the economic class. Although faint Marxist glimmers can still be felt, they serve only to illustrate that even after the fall of the working and political classes, the alternative will not be the humanist, communal dream of the left. The rule of the rich is and will remain the best alternative. One reads between the lines: “Let’s restore the greatness of the USA,” the campaign slogan for Donald Trump’s return to power.

 

Resisting the acceptance of the failure of democratic and enlightened Western civilization, we cling to that narrative so as not to lose speech and reason. It took us more than two thousand years to internalize it; to think anew is profoundly traumatic, for thought itself is trapped by a narrative that was not only social but also scientific. A return to myth appears grotesque to minds deeply alienated and sick. Mental illness seems to be the only refuge, and like Ulysses, we hallucinate, pretending to sow seeds between the furrows, thus avoiding madness with madness itself.

 

Without Realizing It, We Are Being Forced to “Play Dumb”

 

Just like when, despite knowing the obsolescence of supranational institutions that no one respects, we watch the conclaves of world leaders—such as in the latest UN assembly—parade one by one, believing that what is said will be heard and that what is agreed upon will help build a more just and livable world. Even though, upon leaving, the same leaders reconvene to continue wars, technoscientific development of weaponry, and tariff and trade disputes, leaving “what was said” merely in the records of the assemblies of the specter known as the UN.

 

The Russian genius Fyodor M. Dostoevsky reappears: “We were born dead, and for a long time, we were not begotten by living fathers, which pleases us more and more. We are getting used to it. Soon we will invent a way to be born from an idea” (Notes from Underground). Previously, Oedipus had succumbed as the sole mechanism that allowed us to feel “guilt,” and now, from the side of psychosis, we “play dumb” to avoid reality and its consequences.

 

October 2025.