image copyrightNéstor Grassi
For Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl, the popularity of cruel juries on cooking reality shows and the rise of political figures like Trump or Milei are two sides of the same coin.
In his most recent book in Spanish, "Maleducados," he describes how rude and cruel behaviors have stopped being disguised, and have instead become normalized in areas ranging from how we treat food delivery people to the election of presidents.
Salecl, who grew up in the former Yugoslavia under a socialist regime and lived through the dizzying change to a capitalism that he describes as voracious, has been wondering for decades how the dominant ideology manifests itself in our heads.
"I think that the greatest power of any regime occurs when it begins to function in such a way that people do not realize how they are being ideologically molded until they become subjects that support it," he says.
BBC News Mundo spoke with the philosopher, within the framework of the HAY Festival Arequipa 2026. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.
Image source, Courtesy of Ediciones Godot
We have all seen politicians who have made rudeness part of their strategy, but perhaps we downplay it thinking that it is a mere matter of style. Is rudeness a matter of substance or form?
I think it's a matter of style that ended up becoming institutionalized.
As I point out in the book, if we look at television shows like Big Brother, MasterChef or The Apprentice—where Trump became famous—we see that they have institutionalized within the realm of commercial television to treat others rudely, to denigrate them.
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The way these programs work is by generating a certain pleasure among viewers in seeing someone being humiliated.
And I think that politicians fulfill that same role. It's not that people necessarily copy his behavior, although some may, but rather that they enjoy seeing how someone dares to say inappropriate things and behave in a scandalous way, as happens with Milei in Argentina.
In French the term jouissance is used, which is more precise than "pleasure" or "enjoyment" because it has a less positive connotation. It is a kind of pleasure in displeasure, enjoyment in pain. I think, in a way, that's where we are.
I also often refer to the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, who coined the term "interpassivity," the idea that sometimes we don't have to do something ourselves, but rather someone else, or even a machine, does it for us.
Today, that interpassivity is that Trump can act vulgarly for us, Milei can give scandalous speeches and so we don't have to do it.
Of course, some people do believe that they have a kind of permission to become more cruel and rude because the leader behaves that way.
But the biggest problem with rudeness today is that it spreads at a faster speed and gets more attention and visibility on the internet, because it is easier to monetize. Provocative speeches generate more clicks.
Image source, AFP via Getty Images
Your argument is that all of this is fueled by capitalism. How?
Capitalism always had, of course, an element of cruelty. It was to extract the maximum possible from the workers and leave the profits in the hands of the capitalists.
But if you think about the 19th century or even the first decades of the 20th century, there was at least a kind of veneer of civility. The upper classes, especially among themselves, tried to at least keep up appearances. They could be very cruel to the lower classes, but in public they tried to pretend that they behaved in a civilized manner.
What is happening today is that these masks are no longer being used. And we believe it is positive.
But, thanks to psychoanalysis, we know that masks are essential. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said, there is nothing behind the mask. It is precisely in the mask where we usually find the truth of subjectivity. There is no deeper secret.
Today's capitalism has accelerated cruelty, especially in the way it treats workers.
When the ideology that the winner takes all (winner takes all) was imposed, when the idea was established that to climb the ladder of success you have to go over other people and when leaders began to be glorified for firing their employees, as in the program "The Apprentice", I believe that the door was opened to the current situation, in which there are manifestations of rudeness everywhere in the work environment.
This is not something radically new: capitalism was already displacing and treating people badly before.
But what has changed is that this logic has been adopted almost as policy in business schools, leadership discourses, and the like.
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And what is happening to this fundamental notion of psychoanalysis that culture, education and the law help us repress our aggressive and destructive impulses? What is not working in that equation in this world of rudeness?
Certainly, culture has operated in such a way that we repress certain ideas that are incompatible with life in society, or at least we avoid showing them.
But many times they end up emerging in an involuntary or unconscious way. It's not that we get rid of them completely, but that we put them aside.
And it seems that that type of repression no longer works in the same way in contemporary culture. There has been a certain change in the functioning of what in psychoanalysis we call "the Big Other": language, culture, written and unwritten rules.
We could say that certain rules and conventions about how we consider we should behave have been relaxed.
Of course, our attitude toward authority has also changed. The authorities themselves have changed.
Parents are usually no longer the type of authority they once were. Teachers, community leaders, political leaders and even religious leaders have lost their ability to exercise authority.
And all kinds of new authority figures have emerged, especially influencers.
That has transformed, I would say, the way people internalize behavioral patterns.
Also something that has changed is that more and more we believe that it is up to each of us to create our own rules.
That is a fundamental change that is transforming the way people socialize and, I would argue, the entire public sphere. We no longer have a set of shared ideas about what can be true and what can be false.
Of course, those ideas were also questioned in the past. They were not immutable truths.
But today we cannot even reach an agreement on issues such as climate change or infectious diseases, issues on which we previously tended to trust authorities such as scientists more.
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I also wanted to talk about desire. In general, human beings have the desire to be close to other human beings, to love others, and sexual desire as well. Where has that desire gone in this society of rudeness that you describe? Do we still want to be together? Or has it been buried under online fights and shoving on public transport?
I think the desire still exists. I'm not saying that the way people want or crave intimacy has changed. The thing is that now it is much more difficult for them to establish relationships.
A few months ago, the Financial Times published an article showing that fertility rates began to fall around the world with the spread of high-speed internet and access to mobile phones.
What happened was that, first of all, people became less prone to physical contact.
And second, technology opened a space for fantasy. It is easier to build an image of another person than to approach them in person.
Added to this is that social networks have contributed to creating a series of images of what perfection is and an entire ideology based on guilt, according to which we must bring out the best in ourselves in all aspects: in how we look, how successful we are, etc.
Then, expectations become very high and the reality of other human beings ends up being insufficient to live up to the fantasy we have created.
It's clear that social media plays a big role in all of this. But aren't we facing a chicken or egg situation? Are the platforms provoking rudeness or are they simply a channel to express rudeness that was already there? What degree of responsibility do they have?
I think they have an enormous responsibility because they are giving much more visibility to aggressive and violent speeches, fake news and conspiracy theories.
Algorithms make all of that appear much higher up in what other people see. And that is your responsibility.
In the art world, the curator is responsible for what he exhibits. But they, the platforms, do not want to accept that they are curators.
When the internet started to become completely about monetization and they established these addictive mechanisms like likes, they knew what they were doing.
That is why we are beginning to see the first court cases related to the addictive power of social networks.
I am very concerned that a handful of billionaires are at the helm of these enormous companies and that they also know people's psychology so well.
They know how to get them addicted, how to modify their opinions and, of course, how to provoke the emotions I was talking about before: anxiety, guilt, the feeling of not measuring up.
All this contributes to keeping the system in power. If you are constantly worried about yourself, you are unlikely to rebel or organize socially.
In the book you explain that people currently feel powerless in the face of the avalanches of information and misinformation, in the face of a labor market that pays them less than what is necessary to cover their basic expenses. How does that feeling of helplessness lead people to behave more rudely?
It is easy to come to the perception that someone has taken something from you.
That is the logic that often lies behind certain attitudes toward migrants: the idea that it is okay to treat them rudely, even resort to violence or expel them.
The same goes for people of different sexual orientations, who can easily be perceived as someone who is taking something away from you, the traditional family ideal or the social fabric.
And it may seem like all that would be solved if we got rid of people who lead a lifestyle that endangers these traditional ideas.
But they are fantasies. The fantasy of the happy family is precisely that: a fantasy. That family never existed in the past. In traditional families there used to be a lot of cruelty and violence.
You say that when society is going in the wrong direction, it's okay to be angry. Is it possible to be angry and at the same time be kind?
There I refer to Hannah Arendt and her idea that, sometimes, only through anger can we point out injustices.
It's okay to feel anger. The question is how that anger is channeled in society, how it is channeled.
If anger simply spreads throughout society, people end up not only angry at others, but also at themselves. Aggression operates in both directions. We can harm ourselves as a result of that anger.
I agree with Hannah Arendt that it is important to have certain higher ideals of justice, equality or something that represents a promise and allows that anger to be channeled towards change.
And I think that is precisely the question now: whether we still believe enough in the ideals of the Enlightenment or whether we need to invent new ideas capable of channeling that scattered anger and turning it into a possibility of social transformation.
We are seeing some changes.
In Serbia, students won the elections after two years of a rather hopeless struggle against an authoritarian and highly corrupt regime.
Right now, European countries are full of students protesting for higher quality education.
Some of these protests have ended up turning into riots, because, as we know, sometimes certain groups infiltrate. But the movement continues. And I think it's positive that in Europe and elsewhere we are seeing a sort of emergence from apathy.
How that anger will be channeled is the question now.
You insist that there is room for optimism, for hope, for resisting rudeness. What concrete actions can we take to move forward in this direction?
First, I think we should definitely avoid amplifying rude and aggressive speech by sharing it or paying attention to it. It's a very small thing that we can all do.
I also think we need to broaden our perspective. It is not just about our individual decisions, but also the collective decisions we can make in our communities, as citizens.
I remember that after Trump's first victory, Michael Moore, the American filmmaker, wrote in a post that people needed to understand that they had to organize at the local level and present good candidates for school boards and for each of the local public offices. It's really about returning to local communities.
We saw Zohran Mamdani [Mayor of New York] do this very successfully during his campaign. And I think it will be fundamental. People want to have physical contact with other people, with their potential local leaders and so on. The digital world is reaching its own limits.
It is easy to join a digital protest, but much more difficult to organize and fight for change in your own community.
And there will be many battles to fight over data centers, climate change, the exploitation of nature, authoritarian politics and militarization.
That's where I find reasons for optimism: in the fact that people are organizing.
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