Julie is Canadian and her name is not Julie. The authors of a recent article in the journal Culture, Health & Sexuality have hidden their real name because Julie was raped by three men. What makes the case of Julie Rocambolesco is that it is she who could be accused, according to Canadian law, of having abused her aggressors . How is that?

This is because Julie has another feature: she carries the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Therefore, he could develop AIDS or spread it, if he did not take proper precautions, to whom he has a sexual relationship with her. Naturally, Julie's rapists took no preventive action while assaulting her . And this is where the madness of Canadian lawmakers comes into play: if in that country you don't tell your partner, before intercourse, that you carry HIV, you commit a sexual crime. Whoever such a couple is.

"If I had told them that I test positive for HIV, they would have killed me. I know. So, how does that fit into the legal framework?" Julie asks. Certainly, it only fits within a landscape determined to be transparent at all costs . The case of Julie, HIV and Canada can be considered punctual, but it is enough to broaden our gaze to note that the obsession with transparency is far from being an anecdote today.

Let's take a look at any research center in our country. It is known that one of the cruelest cuts made by the governments of Zapatero and Rajoy, unanimous there, was not dedicated, what do I know, to politicians, but to scientists. Today the investment by Spanish in science is half that of the average European. And the crisis cannot serve as an excuse: Europe now invests 22% more in R&D than in 2009, while Spain invests almost 6% less . Now, this thinning in the money has been accompanied by a morbid fattening in the paperwork. Any researcher knows how discouraging the amount of bureaucracy that is demanded from him because of his strange aspiration to want to know the world around us better. There are already project managers who dedicate their entire time to one or the other efforts, not to investigate. If that is added to the multiplication of reports, reports, guides, programs, assessments and other procedures that undergoes university professors, it is not crazy to start thinking of Kafka as the patron of Spanish science.

Why this obsession with bureaucracy? Because bureaucracy is control and politicians are obsessed with controlling researchers in Spain. They don't trust us: we could be corrupt! Luckily they are there to watch over us. Hence, again, this delusional commitment to transparency : you must count every step you take, researcher, inform us of each movement; and if you do not have time to write a large text that details us, almost better that you are not giving it.

All in all, these examples of transparency frenzy pale in the face of what is happening with facial recognition technologies. It is known that the Chinese police already use them to monitor their citizens : know at all times who does what where. It has been 35 years since 1984 for Orwell's panoptic to prosper. In addition, soon any trade, Chinese or not, could use them to know, instantly, who is the unsuspecting customer who has set foot in its premises. And treat him accordingly. The next time Richard Gere visits a shop with his Pretty Woman, he should not clarify that he is obscenely rich and wants to spend indecent amounts of money. The manager will know. That is to say: if Julie, the raped Canadian, was required to confess her viral load to her aggressors, and if the Spanish scientist is asked to count every step that goes up the ladder of knowledge, soon the State could even refrain from walk asking us nothing. Everything about us will know just by looking us in the face; unless the masks are generalized as a new summer-winter complement in future fashion.

How did we come to this? We must recognize that some philosophers have been warning us. The Korean Byung-Chul Han wrote in 2012 about The Transparency Society . There he warned that only machines have completely transparent mechanisms (just know their instruction manual), while the human being is that we are full of holes, shadows, doubts. Even for ourselves. So a society stubborn in transparency is really an inhuman society. In their eagerness to know everything about our peers, in reality we are left only with the most superficial of them: what data or statistics can tell us. The society of transparency is in the end, paradoxical as it sounds, a tremendously myopic society. Or is it not blind to think that you know everything about that influencer who allegedly shows you his entire life on Instagram?

Now, I think we will not fully grasp the current obsession with transparency if we do not realize another sign of our time: distrust. We live obscured by transparency because in our era the lack of trust has spread which epidemic. We do not trust our politicians (in this article I have given some proof of this), and they pay it to us distrusting how much researchers do with their money. We do not trust our elites, who increasingly offer us stupidities ("do not shower, or cause a climate crisis!", "Do not use the masculine, or you will be a macho!", "When I literally copied several sentences of Fulanito without citing him I didn't plague him, it's just that I said common sense things! "). And those elites do not trust us either: a recent study among Washington's advisers and bureaucrats revealed that there is not a single political issue in which more than 6% of them grant the voter enough knowledge to be able to comment.

Distrust spreads because to be confident you have to have faith in something or someone. And we have been derogating all kinds of faith since the time of the Enlightenment. Presumably only the rational, what you can present in public, what everyone can understand and what everyone can convince would be acceptable. Be transparent if you want to be accepted, it is the maximum illustrated. But this commandment forgets that I can only reason if I previously trust someone. I only learned math because as a child I had faith in the teacher who taught them to me, although I didn't see anything clear there. Students only learn Medicine if they trust what their teachers tell them on the board , even if they then use some of the things learned to challenge it. I only behave rationally myself if I trust what my doctors prescribe, instead of starting to do I do experiments to corroborate everything discovered in the history of pharmacology. Faith and reason are not opposed, on the contrary: without certain doses of the first, the second is impossible. This, that any philosopher of the allegedly dark Medievo was clear, today we forget: and hence our obsession with transparency.

Three decades ago, Italian thinker Gianni Vattimo wrote a title book similar to Han: The transparent society . The sign was, however, ironic. He ridiculed the ambition of certain enlightened social democrats (Habermas, Apel ...) who insisted, and have continued to insist, on creating a society of transparency: a world in which we must explain ourselves completely to all. And, above all, before the State. A world without blinds, like the Scandinavian countries . For Vattimo, that transparency was foolish. It is known that in Italy they do use blinds. That is why he may be an author who deserves to be reread.

Let us also pay attention to that metaphor that is our own body: almost all of it is covered with a translucent, but not transparent, skin. And the only part of the transparent whole, our lens, is tiny. And indicated to see the outside rather than to see us inside.

Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz is Professor of Ethics at the Miguel de Cervantes European University.

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