La Vangua's back-page interview goes to one Jean Baudrillard, who isn't sure what he is, "whether a philosopher, a thinker, a metaphysicist, a moralist..." I'd call him simply another long-winded, pretentious wanker with a Ph.D.

A: ...We live under the illusion that we are the masters of our actions, but I do not believe we are responsible for our own lives.

Q: That would lead us to amorality.

A: Yes, yes, or to immorality. I think we live on a double plane. In one, according to the social and moral rules. The other one depends on fate, on something else, on unpredictable things, on meaninglessness, and that reality is so intolerable that we invent a meaning. But I advise people not to let the meaningless level of life out of their sight.

Q: But you define yourself as a moralist.

A. Good and evil, in the end, exchange places. An excess of good produces evil and vice versa; it's a sort of perverse effect that annuls the dividing line between good and evil.

Q: We could establish the frontier at the respect for human life.

A: Existence isn't everything, it's even the least important of things, it's raw material. We think the human being was made in order to live and be happy, but that is just our system of values. To other cultures, happiness and the individual mean nothing. We should relativize our culture and beliefs.

That is about the most nihilistic alleged philosophy I've encountered. Not to mention totalitarian. His "double plane of life" is instantly identifiable as the Freudian id versus the superego. That's nothing new or original. And exactly how does an excess of evil produce good? Think about the Holocaust. Yes, it produced Primo Levi's writings and Anne Frank's diary. And not much else good to balance out all that evil. Finally, one reason I prefer our Western culture to many others is specifically its respect for human life; Baudrillard thinks we should become more like those other cultures!

I don't want to get involved at length in the absolutism versus relativism debate here; I'll merely state that it's been a question that real philosophers like Kant and Aristotle and Mill have been debating for the last 2500 years or so, and Baudrillard has failed to add anything to the discussion except to say we ought to think in a more relativistic way. The main counterargument here, of course, is that if you believe in human rights you're an absolutist--you're saying that no matter what the circumstances are, people have certain rights and violating them is wrong and evil. Remember that bit about "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."? (Jefferson had originally written "sacred and undeniable"; Adams and Franklin suggested the change.) The Founders were absolutists on human rights. If you "hold a truth to be self-evident", you're saying, "Look, dude, this is what I believe and there's going to be no changing due to circumstances. What's wrong is wrong, period."

Ima Sanchis, the interviewer, neatly carves up Baudrillard in her last three questions / statements. Good job, Ima!