Rob Riemen: "Nationalism, fascism, and Islamism became new political religions that promised heaven but brought hell."

With his minimalist glasses, black dress, and elegant white blazer, Rob Riemen (Netherlands, 1962) resembles Michel Foucault, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Riemen is one of the 21st. He speaks of Socrates, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and Friedrich Nietzsche as if they were alive, telling anecdotes about them as if he had witnessed them or they had told him about them (and they have: in their books). Since publishing his debut novel in 1995, Nobleza di spirt (Nobility of Spirit), Riemen has sought to recover classical wisdom, the spirituality inherent in human beings under Cicero's maxim that philosophy is the cultivation of the soul (in Latin it sounds better - Cultura animi philosophia est - especially because he introduces the etymology of the word culture as " to cultivate," "to care for ").

Founder of the Nexus Institute in Tilburg, the city where he studied Theology and Philosophy for ten years, Riemen stands out as one of the last classical European intellectuals , in a Platonic sense. His latest essay, The Word That Defeats Death (Taurus and Arcàdia in Catalan), begins with a Homeric-style prologue, with the Greek Muses confronting a grotesque theater of the absurd with a vain Trump, a Putin wearing heels to appear taller (he is 1'70, just five centimeters taller than Angela Merkel), a Jeff Bezos as Uncle Scrooge, and an Elon Musk dressed as Superman with an X on his chest...

In an era of fragmented identities, you champion humanism. However, the humanities are disappearing from schools, even universities.

Yes. And they're also committing suicide. We live in an era where science, technology, and economics dominate everything. They've become the Holy Trinity. The humanities are, I quote, the indispensable education you need to get through life, which allows everyone to question themselves. I'm referring to the big questions: who am I? Where am I going? What is the destiny of my life? Wittgenstein already says in his Tractatus that when all scientific problems have been solved, the problems of life haven't even been touched. Science won't do it. Technology? No, of course not. Artificial intelligence? Forget it. You need philosophy, the arts, poetry, music! Everything that relates to your inner being. And when all that is disappearing, don't be surprised to have a generation Z or Y, or whatever, that feels insecure, empty, with depressed young people, suicidal tendencies, and so on. We stupidly decided that the humanities are no longer important.

In his book, he denounces the concept of false greatness. He does so through the ghost of Simone Weil and a haunting quote: "Our notion of greatness is exactly the one that inspired Hitler throughout his life. Don't forget it!" Are we doomed to repeat history?

It's the famous idea of ​​George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He's quite right. That's why I wanted to write a book dictated by Clio, the muse of history. As a simple reminder. You really don't need a high education or a college degree to grapple with the meaning of life. Nietzsche understood this perfectly and called it nihilism. It means that there are no longer answers to all your "why?" questions, and life becomes meaningless. If you feel your life is completely empty, you have two options: either you commit suicide or you start looking for substitutes like drugs, entertainment, kitsch , false grandeur... One of those drugs is nationalism.

Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead. Have we replaced him with "new political religions," as you call them? You mention ideologies such as nationalism, Bolshevism, fascism, Maoism, Islamism...

Yes, they became new religions that promised heaven but brought hell on Earth. The 20th century proved this. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza already explained that as a society we should aspire to democracy, but it comes with conditions. The key condition is that people must be educated: not in the sense of knowing a lot of things, but rather that they are able to think for themselves, present arguments, and then try to find the common good. Without that condition, democracy will disappear.

Man is a dual being, both rational and spiritual. Have we amputated our metaphysical side?

That word has become taboo. In too many places, I can't even talk about metaphysical issues. Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian who analyzed the decline of the Middle Ages, said that a culture must have a metaphysical dimension, or it's not a culture. We're human, we have a metaphysical dimension. But try explaining that to Elon Musk or all the engineers focused on AI...

The Iliad, War and Peace, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain ... Reading one of these masterpieces has become "impossible for many," he says in his book. Are we experiencing a certain literary illiteracy in the West?

Yes. But it has been a choice not to educate people more to read. Because we think, again, about the false greatness that science, technology, computers will bring us... Everything has to be useful. Utilitarianism is the paradigm imposed by the political class, the business class, and the power elites. Utility can be quantified with numbers, and the higher the number, the better, right? Everything is numbers. The influencer phenomenon is the most ridiculous. I hope that 100 years from now, historians will recount how stupid those people were. Believing that an influencer who talks about makeup, dresses, or video games has anything to say is hilarious. But they fit into the utility paradigm. The crime of our century is the educational system based on utilitarianism. The younger generation falls victim to the idea that education only serves to provide you with a job and some money, as if there were nothing else. The truth of the matter is, and it's a very old truth, that you need the world of the muses to be happy. You have to read novels and poetry to cultivate your own imagination, because without imagination, you live in your own prison. Philosophy and the muses are the greatest gifts. If you don't cultivate your soul and your reasoning, you become a robot or a slave.

This connects with Plato's myth of the cave. The perverse thing is that we have now built a digital cave. Like George Orwell's Big Brother: we are the ones who feed it on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Is the prison now digital?

Again, it's a choice. There are still bookstores. Go to La Central and forget about Amazon! We're not in China yet. We're not in a totalitarian state yet, and we can decide. The essence of a civilization is the ability to say no . We say no to the use of atomic weapons, to rape, to child abuse, or whatever... You can say no to TikTok, no to Amazon, no to influencers , and to the Big Brother that Orwell predicted. In this book, I dedicate a long chapter to stupidity and lies... Grab The Little Prince ! It's the most beautiful and simple children's book of all, but with more wisdom than thousands of academic nonsense. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wanted every child to recognize themselves, to learn to bring beauty to their own lives, to be fair, to be a true human being. Otherwise, we are nothing more than a bunch of robots focused on our false greatness. That's what happens with Trump, Elon Musk, and all those people... They're nobodies! To hell with them! They have the capacity to destroy, and they're doing it. But when this is over? Zero. They'll be nothing. So why hold those people up as an ideal, as if they were the gods of our time? We're no longer in the America of Franklin Roosevelt, and it won't return for a long time. So, it's time for Europe to get its act together.

And the rise of the far right in virtually every European parliament?

In 2010, I wrote my essay on the eternal return of fascism. Everyone laughed at me. But unfortunately, time proved my critics wrong. I was the first to say that Geert Wilders is the classic contemporary fascist. He controlled the government for two years and it was a complete disaster. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was this idea in Germany, and also in France, that everything was the fault of the Jews. That if we got rid of the Jews, all problems would be solved. Now, something exactly similar is happening with immigrants. The foundations of fascist policies are lies, hatred, scapegoating... 80 years after World War II, this fascist mentality is back almost everywhere.

And democracy is increasingly being questioned...

Because the true origin of the word democracy has been lost. A mass democracy is no longer based on spiritual and moral values, but on greed and fear, which is our economic system. Without moral and spiritual values, a space is created in which the mentality becomes antidemocratic, fascist. This is how demagogues and propaganda machines thrive. As in the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, people are happy to sacrifice their own freedom for obedience to the true leader...

In her book, Clio warns: "The day the Muses are silenced, the one who will rule will be Ares, god of war." Isn't that already happening?

Ukraine, Gaza... And there's more to come in Sudan or... In America, a civil war is already brewing with all the deportations... [sighs] In my books, I try to convey the things I was taught. I find it interesting that all my books are translated and published in Spain and so many other countries, but not in the United States. American publishers have already given up. There's also the official fact that 45% of Americans never touch a book. And that will eventually have political consequences. In Europe, we're in a better position. But we're completely dependent on the Americans. We can't even defend ourselves or Ukraine.

The Pontevedra Biennial, the oldest in Spain, was held again this summer. Although it examines the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, its leitmotif is based on one of his books: "Being Human Again."

Yes! It's something that moved me a lot... In fact, on September 25th I'm going to Pontevedra to give a lecture. We have moral obligations. And the first is to never give up hope, right?