The Free Market Road Show visited the city of Santiago de Compostela for a total six Spanish stops this year. We teamed up, for a second time, with the Center “Xoan de Lugo” and the results were spectacular.
The event in Galicia was absolutely focused on values but from a very innovative perspective. Different speakers analyzed how values are presented and interact in different areas of contemporary culture.
Constanza Huerta de Soto and Ignacio Almará started the event talking about how values are presented in Youtube. Although they acknowledged that Youtube has almost infinite voices and points of views, they claimed that many very popular youtubers have a tendency towards basic desires, consumerism, and free love. “Channels which are mostly subscribed by Millenials and even younger people are full of material that fundamentally contradicts the virtues (both cardinal and theologian) and which exacerbate things such us polyamory or empty consumerism.”
“Values work as a guidance of our behavior towards a long term preference,” they explained and continued, “the current crisis of faith necessarily means a shorter time horizon. Hence, the virtues and values that specifically aim at the long term (such as hope) are abandoned. This is also linked with the European loss of sense of transcendence.”
During the second talk, Miguel Alonso Dávila reflected about the role of action in art.
Mr. Dávila said that, throughout history, human action has suffered a mutation. “From a conscious and useful activity it changed to an obligation to finally become a fatality.”
He also made a very strong defense of action and work. “The mere fact of going to work daily means that we bring order to chaos. Whoever goes to work is a hero.”
Noemí Corral Díaz, who is the Executive Director of the Center Xoan de Lugo, gave very interesting remarks about children’s literature and movies.
“We see today that, due to feminism, even Disney movies go against the traditional concept of a princess. They say that the old model was wrong,” explained Ms. Corral Díaz. She also argued that “contemporary society dismisses too quickly traditional fairy tales and ‘silly’ princesses. It was in fact the case that those tales helped a lot to lead to a deep moral understanding. A kind of understanding that children could not get otherwise.”
Finally, Daniel Rodríguez Carreiro, who is also a member of Xoan de Lugo, talked about values in movies.
“Modern films, however secularized they might be, tend to tell religious stories and be based upon religious values. For instance, the story of ‘ET’ is a modified story of Jesus Christ.” Moreover, Mr. Rodríguez Carreiro claimed that “if we are dealing with a good movie, it will be very likely that it falls in the religious archetypes described by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell.”
Mr. Rodríguez Carreiro gave a list of examples of ‘capitalist’ and ‘anticapitalist’ movies.
To the former belong films such as “The Seven Samiurais” – which according to Rodríguez Carreiro is a magnificent in favour of the value of saving; “Other People’s Money” – in which Danny de Vito shows how and why capitalism is the best way employ capital; and “Conan the Barbarian” – in which the main character has to work really hard in order to become a hero.
Examples of the later are, according to Rodríguez Carreiro, movies like ‘Matrix’ or ‘Limitless.’ “These films,” he explained, “express the exact opposite of a work ethic. The heroes have to do basically nothing in order to perform that function.”