“When we look for a natural reason to have enemies, we give voice to a very cultural fear”

Perhaps we recognize the most violent periods by making the enemy “existential.” We must listen and hear ourselves speaking in philosophical terms about political and military struggles. States and institutions rediscover themselves as “existential enemies.” These enemies should threaten our existence at the same time that they condition it, since they should allow us to negatively define what we really are, our identity and our “values”.

But an enemy, in truth, is always “existentialized”, because it comes from an operation of emotional and political confusion. When we face an enemy, questions of principle and instinctive reactions coexist. Most of our hostilities have their origin in distaste for a few beings to whom we attribute the worst vices. We say “ah, I know them,” while imagining a gallery of bad people we have encountered during our lives.

The figure of the enemy is formed from first-hand but also second-hand experiences, family stories, anecdotes of loved ones, media discourse; A shapeless clay of annoyance is born, of frank hatred for a certain way of behaving. In that ball of animosity towards certain people we sculpt the representation of the type of being that we hate the most. His figure ends up imprinted on all the ideas we fight: injustice, stupidity… They are nothing without that monstrous organism manufactured by our imagination: the enemy. And, conversely, disgust for that predator or that bastard that haunts our mind will not give rise to an enemy if we do not get an idea from it. The enemy is capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism; others will say: it is a people, a nation, a religion.

Therefore, you need at least two ingredients to create an enemy: something very concrete and something very abstract. But soon we will no longer be able to tell them apart. The form of evil quickly takes the form of those we hate. Here we reach the fusion point of enmity, which concentrates psychology and politics in an incandescent existential principle. And that’s not normal? We will say. It’s healthy, it’s natural to make enemies! With a certain grandiloquence ill-informed by animal ethology, we will appeal to instinct and the fight for life.

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