THE GREAT SCAM. Opinion Section by David Cerdá

A School Where Everything Is Not for Sale

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David Cerdá

If there is one thing we urgently need to teach yet systematically neglect, it is what is not for sale—few ideas are more essential to refine, particularly in secondary education. In a world that has come to equate “freedom” with OnlyFans, it is imperative that every citizen leaves the education system armed with a solid—if not entirely robust—theory of dignity.

When explaining what principles are, I often recount an anecdote involving an expert in the matter. ‘These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others’. Many are unaware that Groucho Marx, a man of firm principles himself, never actually said this. However, the anecdote he recounts in Groucho and Me, his memoirs, is entirely genuine. Groucho is in a bar and asks a woman whether she would sleep with him for an obscene amount of money—let’s say, in today’s terms, a hundred million dollars. The woman, assuming the figure to be purely hypothetical, agrees. Groucho then places a ten-dollar bill on the counter and invites her to seal the deal. ‘What do you take me for?’ she protests. To which he replies, ‘That has already been established; now we are merely negotiating the price’.

What always follows when I tell this story is laughter—ranging from wry chuckles to outright guffaws, depending on my skill as a storyteller or the mood of the room. Or rather, that was the case. What I have noticed in recent years among younger audiences (18-21 years old) is that they remain entirely unmoved. At first, I thought the fault was mine—that I had failed to deliver it properly—and even made awkward attempts to explain the punchline. But I no longer bother, because I have realised why there is no laughter: there is a growing number of young adults who simply do not grasp the notion that some things are not for sale. In fact, unless I am particularly inclined to measure how far the tide has risen, I have stopped telling the story altogether.

We are churning out—at an ever-accelerating pace—people without principles. ‘Tinder!’ as Groucho exclaims in Go West. That is, we are producing individuals who believe that everything has a price. Of course, within the younger generations, there are individuals of extraordinary ethical and political commitment—people of firm convictions, principled, engaged, admirable. But what matters is the average, and that is plummeting. And this is our fault, among other things, that of the education system—incapable of moral assertiveness, lost in fruitless factional battles, and hijacked by the political agenda, which gnaws away at its core, law by law, government by government.

For those who refuse to see this reality, two irrefutable pieces of evidence. First, OnlyFans. The problem is not merely that teenagers are present on this platform—primarily young women as the “product”, young men as consumers. This subscription-based service, created in 2015, is nearing two hundred million users and saw a staggering 1,300% growth between 2019 and 2021 (evidently, the pandemic did not only drive us towards virtual museum visits). Naturally, we do not call the more than three million individuals selling themselves on this platform “prostitutes” but rather “content creators”. Needless to say, the feminine form is more than justified—this has always been about the same thing: the commodification of women, and they are overwhelmingly the ones selling themselves. The other day, many were scandalised when an Italian teacher was suspended for having an account on this platform. Some rushed to decry an attack on individual freedom; others hastened to point out that her institution was Catholic. What can I say? To me, teaching—which is more than just a job—is simply incompatible with certain things.

Second example: the Spanish Congress of Deputies. The reader may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when the seat of national sovereignty was not like a jumble sale. Today, realpolitik has been reduced to a bargain basement—anything goes, no electoral programme is honoured, and the act of deceiving one’s own voters is called “to be a smooth operator”. Whenever the reader has doubts about the state of principles in Spain, a glance at the latest news from the Carrera de San Jerónimo will suffice to dispel them. After all, these politicians were schooled in the very education system we have designed—one they themselves have helped shape—a system in which no trace remains of the fundamental truth that some things should never be for sale.

‘We’re all whores, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves’. So speaks Tommy Shelby (Peaky Blinders), one of today’s youth icons, whether we care to admit it or not. There is something called “dignity” that marks the boundary of what is not for sale. To far too many secondary school graduates, this notion is utterly alien. Yet this idea is not just another abstract concept—it is one of those that form the very bedrock of civilised life, at least when we aspire to lead lives of meaning and decency. Those who sell everything remain mere subjects; they never attain full citizenship. And sooner or later, they will end up selling themselves—ensnared by the mentality of the slave.

A world where everything is for sale is a world not worth living in. And a person who never learns to defend a space for what must remain unsellable will, sooner or later, be left by the wayside.

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[David Cerdá’s latest book is El bien es universal. Una defensa de la moral objetiva, published by Rialp.]

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons