THE DEATH OF THE MASS-MAN. A silent pacific revolutionary movement is spreading across Europe

In 1928 a young Spanish filosopher, Ortega y Gasset, published a book that would define the history of the 20th century. It was entitled “La rebelión de las masas” and it would be soon translated into many foreign languages becoming a best-seller at his time. In this book he predicted what would later be defined by the media as the “mass-society” . A society integrated by a majority of individuals who have a lot of material possessions but have given up their political will and their critical mind. This mass-man takes all for granted like a spoiled child, is full of  desires and continous insatisfaction, consumes all natural resources without even wondering where they come from, does not believe in higher duties or sacrifice, lives passively and just seizes the day. Easy to manipulate by an organised minority, the mass-man has no memory nor long-term projects for the society…

Unfortunately Ortega y Gasset´s predictions in 1928  became true and the 20th century can be defined like the era of the mass-man, and the triumph of the mass-society.

But a new pacific movement is taking place. It is so silent we can hardly listen to its rumour, it is almost invisible but can be spotted though the facts. Some brave people who belong already to the 21st century have decided they do not want to be mass-men anymore. And this spark is spreading the fire. All over the world, but specially in Europe, men and women are waking up to their duties, recovering their critical voices and claiming for a new world, calling for a  new legal international order, for the end of man-made frontiers, for an alternative way of economic development that preserves the Earth from a long announced disaster…. These people have slowly started to know and exercice their rights.

And this is the silent revolutionary movement of the ordinary man. The mass-man is dead and a new man is born. 50 years after the birth of the European Union this new ordinary man is defying the existing legal orders and making national state divisions break into pieces. Internet technology and democratic traditions are finally giving this man the voice and stage that he needed.

European integration has maybe made this new conscience possible. The transfer of sovereignity from national states towards the European institutions has produced a new European state of mind. We all take for granted new rights that did not exist 50 years ago: the right to travel free, to work and settle in Europe where we want, to marry other Europeans, to send our children to study to other countries, to have European free medical insurance when we travel, to buy properties abroad, to create companies and invest freely in the world. And most importantly, we are all concious about the access to a system of European justice that the EU treaties gave directly to us, the citizens, contrary to the EES or other international treaties that restrict direct access for ordinary people and offer only procedures for the States. For 50 years now European citizens have enjoyed the right to bring their cases against their national states or European institutions to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg or even the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

David against Goliath. Citizens versus States…Access to supranational justice might have been the spark of this silent revolution taking place in Europe. And this trend is a movement that cannot be stopped or reversed because it has changed the way Europeans perceive the world. It has produced the birth of a this new man.

At the time when United States is trying to destroy the achievements of the international legal rules and the United Nations weak supremacy by spreading the geopolitic of chaos on the basis of “preventive wars”….this new man is convinced that any country has the right and the moral obligation to intervene in the internal affairs of another nation when a genocide is taking place, when its population is starving, when a disaster such a tsunami or an earthquake strikes, when environmental pollution is at stake…this new man connot tolerate corruption, injustice or death of civilians qualified as “collateral damages”.

This new man goes down to the street and demonstrates peacefully. He believes in a new kind of grass-root democracy, a  movement from the botton of society that aims to gain power as peacefully as effectively because the old institutions do not serve the problems that the new century has brought. This man believes in a change of power, in a regeneration of society. He is participating in new civil associations, volunteering in NGOs and maybe active in new political parties.

For this man the world is unique and it cannot be fragmented into pieces by multinational companies, international mafias or even States. This man can perceive that nations alone cannot fight against the problems of the century; terrorism, traffic of human beings, wars, aids or poverty. Supranational efforts are needed, if Europe does not have the right competence to intervene, this man searches for other international solutions. History never repeats itself but a new judge in Spain, the famous “juez Baltasar Garzón” has taken over the Spanish philosophical legacy and is offering to the world the new legal basis for this international order revolution. I am sure Ortega y Gasset would be proud of him, as he proves the old mass-man from the 20th century is dead.

The new man is maybe nowhere more remarkable than on his environmental views. All across Europe a new generation of people is now convinced that human “progress” can bring even negative results on the terms of social achievements. Economic growth can be destructive to a nature that is too fragile to survive. All of a sudden lost causes seem to revive and a call to enfore the Kioto Protocol is more alive than ever. Al Gore documentary “An inconvenient truth” is only the top of the iceberg.

Iceland is not an exception to this revolution of the ordinary man. More and more people are raising the voices to wonder about the future of their country and society. We can already see the waves provoked by this new “Framtiðarlandið” movement. 15.000 people marched in silent down Laugavegur following the call of a unique brave man and mourning for a nature forever lost. A new political party is born and its aim is to wake up critical minds, independent views, different brave solutions…. Searching for the new man.