We listened to the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with a bottle of mineral water in hand to get rid of the excesses of the New Year’s Eve in a healthy way. Part barbarian and part child, perhaps we were one of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the beginning of the year in New York’s Times Square, paralyzed at an intersection or having dinner with drunken men in a traffic jam. as a family, supporting the nephews, the know-it-all brother-in-law, and not rejecting the conga dance. The first babies of the year were born, struggling to become a current face or a naive figure from the past in a matter of seconds. Those old new years were not paid for with Bizum, and the Kings of the East were replaced by a host of drones. Now babies are called Mohamed or Rodriga. They will suddenly sign up for Mandarin Chinese classes.
In some unforgettable pages, Ortega distinguished between things changing in our world and the changing of the world that occurs with each generation. To put it in Ortegui’s terms, today’s belief system is being replaced by another today. So once again one doesn’t know what to think about the world. This has a lot to do with the changes and accelerations in recent years; 2024 could be a pioneer year.
We moved from the ‘Radetzky March’ with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to reggaeton with Spotify; From duck confit to vegan emulsion, from Havana cigars to e-cigarettes, from football to discussing gender changes. How was it possible for Silvana Mangano’s divine profile to disappear from the universe through the wonders of rhinoplasty? ‘Disc jockey’s’ tirade shakes tents light years away from Bing Crosby.
New Year’s alarms resemble the horrors of the New Middle Ages, and customary rites give way to pagan confusion. The most optimistic think that the coming year can be good and also very important; The most pessimistic cite the number of precedents that have turned a confident end to the year into a new year more prone to unrest.
We forgot all this for a moment and there was a general bonding with the ringing of twelve bells and the first embrace of the new year. We are not created merely for doubt, and we must be able to hope that clear days will follow the alarms. We expect and at the same time fear the new frontiers of knowledge, advances in medicine, and the desire to create institutions that preserve the balance between order and freedom. As the twelve grapes pass through the esophagus, after the long belt of the old and the new night, a festive interlude emerges that seems like a reasonable possibility of hope, but suddenly we are in another year, elusive, unpredictable, unreliable. Algorithms create dizziness, as if sailing on huge waves at all times.
Ortega also talked about the generations that distorted themselves. Let’s replace the lost illusions. This is a matter that will take several months. Talks of emotional politics, psychotherapeutic society and new rights are developing there. Civic virtues become a Ciceronian garment that one can put on and take off like fake bangs. The year 2024 looks set to be a year when the new political generation will devote themselves to talking about public virtue, without wanting to distinguish between rights and duties. They say they will do their best in this regard.