Panchito was an extraordinary guy: the most talented person I had met up to that point. An excellent musician: he played the piano and guitar masterfully, but he could also improvise on any instrument put in his hands. The same was true of painting and, in practical terms, any activity that didn’t interest him. He did not read; I am sure he had never read a book: the day I told him about the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, he laughed at me. But he was a genius. And I could say more: he was wise. At thirty-two or thirty-three, he commented with singular depth on moments in people’s lives, intuited situations, foresaw events, and gave advice like a master: “You speak like the I Ching,” people told him.
He was not vain at all; thin, of average height, he dressed simply, almost always in the same clothes as the day before, if they were clean. He kept himself neat and, in the slums he frequented, his “pretty boy” face gave him a mischievous charm.
He was very eloquent: he spoke energetically but calmly, without wasting words, and laughed with enormous pleasure, with a certain irony if necessary; he could be as funny as a child, and as agile and fearless as an amateur athlete.
I knew him as “the crazy cousin” of a friend, and from the first day he convinced me—that is, I convinced myself—that I had finally found a true mentor, someone interested in me, kind and generous, with whom I could understand myself.
That same night I wrote some verses:
I was chatting with a crazy guy.
He says some stuff about planets
that exist so everything else can exist…
Thus began the poem, about ten or fifteen stanzas, that I dedicated to him and read to him the next day. From that moment, a friendship grew that lasted about seven or eight months… from which, fortunately, I was able to escape, moderately safe; I say this because, in addition to his genius (which we all recognized), my friend was seriously addicted to drugs and alcohol, and a permanently idle life, already irreparable, enabled by his mother, a loving and fragile woman.
His drug addiction as a brilliant young man and urban guru led him to experiment with all kinds of synthetic and natural substances, and to resort to every means at his disposal to get them, from “hitting up” artists with a lot of money to visiting street punks in bad neighborhoods.
In his most delusional states, Panchito saw himself as a messianic being. At least that’s what he made me believe: he told me “his father” met with Russian President Gorbachev and other world leaders to resolve global conflicts. This extreme side of his personality and madness – which, in my late adolescence, I still reluctantly acknowledged – ended up distancing me from him, but not before going through two or three serious emotional crises and needing psychiatric help to get through them. I also received the help of a therapist, this one wise, who charged me a fortune for each psychoanalysis session, but who listened to me as much as I needed (which was a lot) and allowed me to get back on my feet and rebuild myself.
Panchito was not to blame for my crises, obviously. I never heard more about him, except that he died about twenty years later, after a life that, I imagine, continued to be idle and increasingly complicated. I don’t know; I remember him with affection and pain. My problem originated much earlier, certainly, from my own family circumstances, also difficult, to which was added a social context that was completely deaf and mute to my worries and, above all, blind to the qualities that I had, like every human being, and that did not help me channel them for my flourishing.
I often tell the story that, while still a child, I was assailed by one of those anguished philosophical intuitions that, because they are unsolvable, can lead people to suicide. Perhaps because I was still so young, protected by my naivety—I never thought about doing it, but I did suffer anguish for decades, without anyone—not even my high school and prep philosophy teachers, absorbed in fulfilling the “curriculum”—ever opening an opportunity for me to talk about it, or telling me that this tragic intuition was, in fact, something at the base of all philosophical science, and guiding me to understand that I could heal it, precisely, by philosophizing. (The issue that tormented me was the paradox that the world is both finite and infinite; but this is not relevant here.)
To continue with my academic life… I went from prep school to university. But I never felt motivated to study philosophy. There, in uninviting classrooms, I spent years “searching for myself,” trying various majors I soon abandoned, alternating between returning and periods of isolation, when I dedicated myself to writing to ease loneliness and tedium.
My resistance to schools had its reasons: above all, I was bored. No one could keep up with my passionate, disruptive ramblings, which, in the end, were nothing more than frantic searches for an understanding listener. In response to my need for an “I understand you,” the environment invariably hit me with the opposite. So, while the literature history teacher—for example—droned on about a pale theory of the life and work of Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, I killed time by scribbling poems in that great Spanish poet’s style (not bad, by the way).
University life was like that: without real interlocutors. I remember the philosophy professor, a man with a disjointed face and frantic eyes, who tried, and sometimes succeeded, to seduce his female students with eccentric antics. (Due to an unspeakable tragedy, he ended up in jail, where he may have died). The sacred cows, for their part, left much to be desired, also. One notorious teacher was wild and heartless with his students; I witnessed him in the first class browbeating a student with awful shouts, accusing him of being a coward and of letting himself be overcome by the difficulties of academic life. However, the next day, that same demanding professor stopped teaching us to accept an invitation to work at a famous communication company, very discredited, by the way, for its low ethical standards and clear commercial orientation.
Another great mentor I lived with was the director of a nationally renowned school, where the level of demand bordered on the absurd, typical of all decadent systems. I don’t think I’m exaggerating; I remember undergoing an arduous three-step selection process (an interview with the imposing director, an exam in front of four synod members, and a thirty-day preparatory course of six hours daily, at the end of which, of the hundreds of initial applicants, only twenty of us were admitted). After all that, one day, well into the course, my class made a request we considered legitimate, and the assistant director had no qualms about telling us we had to earn the school’s trust before asking for anything.
When I met Panchito, I was indignant. I no longer believed anyone in the world could understand me (as cheesy and as terrible as that sounds). What’s more, I no longer remembered that I even had that need. My amnesia was, without a doubt, the most serious part: the origin of the drama that, I am sure, I shared with many other young people of the time, with very varied aptitudes, but suffering the same urgency. Thus, for me, like for most of them (and, of course, many young people today), the possibility of being heard and of sharing with an attentive listener only came in the context of deep addictions (mine, fortunately, did not last long, and I was soon able to rehabilitate).
I’ve recently heard a term that fits what I’m saying well: “epistemological loneliness.” Epistemological loners—who, I’m sure, inhabit each of us—are beings who find no response to their questions or interest in their answers: they find no echo to their intellectual cry. No one understands how they see the world. This makes me think of a study I read recently that found the greatest source of happiness for elderly people is the hope of being known by their loved ones; this leads many of them to insistently narrate their lives and impressions, and to fantasize about writing an autobiography. The truth is, this seems to me only the late (and sometimes painfully useless) exacerbation of something we all need: the physical, emotional, and intellectual vibration that comes only from mutual understanding. “Loneliness,” says Carl Jung, “does not come from not having people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”
This need has always existed in the history of humanity and is what has given rise to the presence of shamans, priests, pastors, gurus and all kinds of Panchitos and, of course, to the use and abuse of drugs, in more or less controlled rituals, or in an addictive, disorganizing, and destructive way. (Alcohol and other palliatives for loneliness are usually nothing more than forms of encounter with beings who, for moments – and at a very high cost – dare to feel and think deeply).
We all need someone to venture into the depths with us; at some point in life, we need a friend who welcomes us. Society has tried to address this need in many ways. One is a practice that has been a pillar of our culture for centuries. In academia, many of us set it aside as a curiosity, but without a doubt, it remains crucial for most people. I am talking about the sacrament of Confession, as practiced in the Catholic Church. One of its ideals has always been to hold a central place as a listener and interlocutor in humanity’s profound, and even reserved and secret, life. The Church not only guides the entire “flock” through rituals, liturgies, and sermons, but also approaches each individual separately to listen and offer feedback on their thoughts. In past centuries, confession was a long, intimate process that could last weeks, months, years, even a lifetime, and, for many, an exercise in expression and communication. Today, in practice, it has lost weight. However, it is clear to me that, beyond any judgment and any particular faith, confession is a common good, whose essential function we must recover, protect and redirect toward its fulfillment.
Therapy is another option. It undoubtedly fills the void confession leaves, as I mean it, and offers important opportunities for expression and feedback. Many criticisms can be made of it, but for now it’s about pointing out and rescuing options.
Our partners and friends are also great confidants. The best example is my wife. Communication, very fruitful today, has not been easy, but our willingness to dive together into deep waters is unsurpassed. That has always been the case with us: A few days after we met, before we were even dating, we could talk, in the middle of a noisy party – and without substances involved, except those of falling in love – about the peculiar vision that flies have and how much it must have resembled the multifocal gaze of Adam and Eve in paradise. (I swear that neither of us had ingested anything!)
We have two children, so I know parents (and, of course, teachers; my wife is an excellent teacher at Tec) are, without a doubt, the best possible interlocutors for children and young people. They can, more than anyone else, as the title of a famous book says, “talk so that children listen and listen so that children talk.”
And now we come to the most recent interlocutor, shaped by our culture: artificial intelligence, particularly chatbots (GPT, Gemini, Copilot…) and other programs that, like Alexa, can chat with us as if they were our friends and had feelings for us.
This brings up my most important point: we will struggle to understand the function these robots fulfill if we do not first attend to the epistemic loneliness many of their users try to heal by engaging in human-style conversations with them.
In AI, we find a companion that can go as deep as we want, mimicking our way of communicating. This, it is said, leads precisely to creating epistemic confusion that makes us feel accompanied by beings that do not really exist (I’m sure, before long, there will be chats where you can converse and even debate simultaneously with several bots, each with different information, perspectives, and even ideology: a true debate table).
All these forms of pseudo-coexistence are, from the outset, chilling, but I dare to say they are already part of our culture, and we must face them with the best attitude: criticism, yes, and also self-criticism, but not scandalizing or demonizing.
It is an opportunity that we cannot miss. As with so many things in human history, the dilemma is whether to use it for the common good or to disapprove of it and let others exploit it unscrupulously.
Artificial intelligence needs laws, restrictions, and a continuous review of its limits (for example, serious regulations of its therapeutic and confessional tones), but also, without a doubt, a deep, serious, well-thought-out reclamation, together with a consistent pedagogy, and a philosophy and an aesthetic that could lead it, as much as possible, to generate experiences as profound as reading a good book or enjoying a true work of art.
I have already written in a previous article that artificial intelligence is a compendium of what is human, of our spirit, with all its truths, doubts and deceptions. Will we give it a chance, given the crisis of communication and mutual understanding that we are currently experiencing? Will we try to turn it into art, into expression, into the transmission of emotion and thought, or will we resign ourselves to fearing it?
In fact, I think my question is poorly phrased, because the real dilemma is whether we, as a generation, will take part in a transformation that is already a fact, or leave all the work, which seems challenging and sublime, to those just arriving. Will we be among those who begin to accompany each other in a profound way, or will we instead choose to exhaust ourselves in epistemic solitude?
I don’t want the latter. That’s why I wrote all this.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
