By Michael A. Galascio Sánchez
Doctor of Health and Clinical Psychology · Political Consultant

Spain has become a soft, self-congratulatory society in which competence is treated as a moral failing and mediocrity is elevated into a civic virtue. The psychological mechanism is straightforward: when a culture systematically shields its young from the consequences of incompetence, it produces adults who cannot distinguish between entitlement and achievement. They inhabit an unprecedented material comfort—food, shelter, digital distraction, and a welfare apparatus that cushions almost every failure—and from that padded cell they conclude that the world owes them perpetual ease. Responsibility is experienced as oppression; struggle is pathologized; the very idea that one must earn competence before demanding status is dismissed as archaic cruelty. This is not “progress.” It is the psychological equivalent of atrophy. Muscles that are never loaded do not grow stronger; minds that are never required to confront difficulty do not develop the capacity for judgment.

The sociological data are not subtle. The most recent PISA cycles show Spanish fifteen-year-olds registering their weakest historical performance in reading comprehension. Roughly one in three fails to reach the basic threshold—identifying the main idea of a moderately complex text, locating explicit information, reflecting when prompted. The proportion capable of handling lengthy, abstract, or counter-intuitive material is vanishingly small. A society whose young cannot reliably extract meaning from written language has already forfeited the prerequisite for serious political thought. Critical capacity does not emerge from slogans or curated feeds; it is forged by the disciplined encounter with difficult texts and the willingness to be corrected by reality. When that encounter is optional, the result is a generation of intellectual consumers rather than producers—comfortable, easily managed, and permanently aggrieved when the world refuses to rearrange itself around their feelings.

Politically, this is the classic signature of civilizational late stages. Soft societies that inherit the hard-won capital of earlier generations—rule of law, technological abundance, residual social trust—and then treat that capital as a permanent endowment rather than a fragile achievement, eventually consume it. Spain is not unique in this trajectory, but it is particularly far along the curve. Merit is subordinated to equity theater; educational standards are diluted in the name of inclusion; the language of rights expands while the language of duties contracts. The young, having been raised in this solvent, prefer the quiet surrender of freedoms to the discomfort of defending them. They are not rebels. They are clients of a therapeutic state that rewards grievance and punishes rigor. Call it decadence if the word still carries any sting; the pattern is older than the term. Republics and empires alike have watched their youth trade vigilance for comfort and then act surprised when the former evaporates.

Hence the language change. Continuing to address an audience that has largely lost the tools—and the appetite—for sustained critical engagement is an exercise in diminishing returns. English still functions, however imperfectly, as a medium in which competence is less reflexively treated as suspect and where the argument can be tested against readers who have not yet fully internalized the ethic of effortless desert. The alternative is to keep whispering complex realities into a culture increasingly optimized for the opposite. That would be charitable. It would also be pointless.