From the R36 to the R78: From a Spain of Talents to One of Mediocrity and Corruption

Mid-20th century Spain, despite its limitations, produced intellectual figures of great weight, while today's Spain, with more resources and freedom, seems to have prioritized visibility over depth.

The official narrative of the Transition, the one sold to us for decades, painted a quantum leap: from pre-constitutional darkness to the light of democracy. According to this version, before 1978, Spain was an intellectual wasteland, a desert of ignorance and vulgarity. Then, suddenly, modernity, culture, and thought arrived. The problem arises when you stop listening to the story and start looking at the names.

That Spain, poor, censored, and marked by a devastating civil war, gave the world or hosted figures like **Camilo José Cela**, **Miguel Delibes**, **Vicente Aleixandre**, **Dámaso Alonso**, **Julián Marías**, or **Xavier Zubiri**. Writers and thinkers whose work still resonates today, decades later. This is not about idealizing Francoism, which had its own censorship and its own problems, but the comparison becomes uncomfortable. Even in that context, intellectual personalities with their own voice emerged. Today, however, a considerable part of the supposed Spanish intellectual elite seems to be manufactured in the same communication workshop.

## The Opinion Machine

One of the most unique achievements of the '78 Regime has been the creation of a vast infrastructure. We have universities, faculties, experts, institutes, observatories, foundations, awards, congresses, advisors, pundits, and a legion of political journalists. A machinery that, in theory, should foster talent. However, too often, the result is a professional repeating on television the same phrases that their party has been espousing since early morning. We have an infrastructure that a writer from 1950 would have considered science fiction, but public debate often seems like that of a neighborhood community arguing about the elevator.

The problem is not the absence of talent, which exists. Nor is it the lack of formal freedom, which is much greater now. The crux of the matter is what kind of person the system rewards. In today's Spain, a hybrid of intellectual, public relations specialist, and ideological employee has prospered. Someone with an opinion on everything, who, by a curious statistical coincidence, always ends up thinking the same as their political, media, or professional environment. Change the opinion party, and the "independent intellectual" trinc suit. What was unacceptable yesterday is necessary today, and tomorrow it will have been proven that it was always intolerable. A censor with a red pen is not needed when a good part of people know which opinions open doors, get a column, an invitation, a subsidy, or simply the peace of mind of belonging to the right group.

## Professional Conformity

This is one of the most corrosive aspects of the system: not the lack of freedom, but the ease with which freedom turns into professional conformity. The old censor told you what you couldn't write. The modern mechanism is more subtle: no one forces you, but everyone understands what kind of opinion facilitates your career and what hinders it. And then, everyone can look in the mirror and still consider themselves free spirits. It's a cleaner, more democratic, and, above all, less unpleasant system than admitting that a good part of our public sphere operates on purely pragmatic incentives.

It's comical that we've never had so many tools to generate rigorous thought. Immediate access to millions of books, digitized archives, universities, global databases, the internet, instant translation, and almost free communication. Freedom of expression incomparable to that of mid-20th-century writers. If intellectual production depended solely on the means, Spain should be a Renaissance Florence with fiber optics. Even so, a significant part of the public conversation consists of pundits analyzing for hours the latest sentence from a minister, while other pundits from the opposing tribe explain why that same sentence proves the opposite.

## The Bureaucracy of Culture

And it's ironic that the system that boasts most about culture has developed an obsession with creating a bureaucracy for culture. Sometimes, the existence of six organizations dedicated to promoting a supposed great writer, twelve people in charge of coordinating them, and another twenty preparing a roundtable on the need to foster the emergence of great writers seems more important than the writer himself. If **Cela** had needed all the institutional structure that now surrounds any cultural activity, he would probably still be filling out forms.

This comparison is not intended to prove that a dictatorship produces better literature; that would be foolish. Many of the great names of that era wrote despite the regime, not thanks to it. What it does allow is to ask a more uncomfortable question: if we now have more freedom, more education, more money, more universities, better media, and almost unlimited access to knowledge, why is it so difficult to identify intellectual figures in Spanish public life with the weight and independence of those generations?

Perhaps because we have ended up confusing thought with opinion, prestige with visibility, culture with cultural industry, and intellectual with a person who appears a lot on television. The '78 Regime has not eliminated talent, but it has built around it a tangle of intermediaries, structures, political careers, and belonging mechanisms that often make adaptation more profitable than brilliance. Hence that peculiar feeling of living in a country with countless graduates and experts, but increasingly dependent on childish arguments.

That is, probably, the fiercest irony. The Spain of the **'36 Regime** was poor, authoritarian, censorious, and materially perversos, and yet it produced names that are now an undisputed part of Spanish culture. The Spain of the **'78 Regime** has infinitely better conditions to create, study, write, and think, but it has developed an extraordinary capacity to fill public space with perfectly interchangeable people. If you change one pundit for another, it's barely noticeable; if you replace an organic columnist with one from the neighboring newspaper, often you just need to replace four names and two adjectives.

Perhaps that is the great, least confessable cultural legacy of the **'78 Regime**: not having eradicated intelligence, but having managed to surround it with so much professionalized mediocrity that it is sometimes hard to find.