From Exploited to Expendable

At the end of last year, a detailed study on values in Catalonia was published, one that also serves as a moral ultrasound. It is not, however, an essay or a survey, but the Report on Social Exclusion and Development in Catalonia, produced by the Foessa Foundation. It is a rigorous report, prepared by leading institutions and researchers, and precisely for that reason it provides an excellent portrait of the values of Catalan society. This is not the time to summarise its data, but to allow the data to read us. While Pope Francis warned us about the globalisation of indifference, this report highlights the Catalanisation of indifference.

We are constantly told that, in our current context, the macroeconomic figures are quite good. What is not good, the report tells us, is people’s personal circumstances. This is starkly illustrated by the institutional tendency to move homeless people elsewhere so that they do not spoil the image we would like to project. Once again, the report shows, for example, how the shortage of available housing is a pandemic that produces exclusion, a genuine social emergency, even though we still talk about it as if it were merely a collection of personal problems and failures. These problems and failures are certainly widespread, but they are approached according to the principle that everyone must fend for themselves.

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Article by Josep M. Lozano, Professor Emeritus at Esade, published in El Periódico.