Nando el Hispano and the existential mortgage of being born

Being born is an imposition and free will, a cosmetic myth

There is a paradox that holds itself up: the person who signs the most radical condemnation of existence is still here, writing. Nando el Hispano, author of «El Niño Lunar: la imposición de nacer» (The Lunar Child: The Imposition of Being Born), argues that the supposed meaning of life is nothing more than a cosmic mortgage, an existential tax that a genealogy of horrified apes coercively transfers to every new creature. Procreation, he says, is not magnanimity: it is the collective rationalization of the ego, of narcissism and of the metaphysical envy of those who need to replicate captivity in order to dilute the weight of their own finitude.

Biological determinism as a starting point

The framework of the argument is thermodynamic before it is sarracena. We are nothing more than automata dissipating resources in an entropic enclosure, and self-awareness operates like a metastasis. On that basis, free will is dismissed as an ontological impossibility: if birth is an imposition and the outcome is the inevitable degradation of the flesh, any subsequent decision is not sovereignty but adaptive reaction. The image he uses is that of the slave who only gets to choose how to decorate his cell.

The examples he cites seek the point of friction: the child raised in a family that uses him as a scapegoat, the organism that develops an arbitrary cancer, the individual forced to march off to someone else's war. To this he adds institutional coercion —a corrupt State, he argues, a reflection of the human being itself and upheld by armed forces of repression— and the definitive physical sentence: aging and death.

The contradiction thrown back at him from the other side

The most frequent objection is not metaphysical but one of consistency in living: if everything is captivity and life a grotesque imposition, why keep going? The author's answer does not dodge the clash. He admits to having a cosmic ego and shifts the solution to the collective plane: the disappearance of the individual does not alter the machinery of the wasteland, so his lucidity remains waiting for the definitive cessation of the ego of the total mass.

That is where the most uncomfortable thesis of the argument arrives. The coordinated and collective extinction of the species would not be an act of hostility, but the purest manifestation of metaphysical affection: the only mathematical way to shield the innocent consciences yet to be born. The ape, he concludes, confuses love with the blind perpetuation of its misery.

The "afterlife" as an argumentative escape

The text also takes aim at those who claim that death is what gives life meaning and, at the same time, invent an afterlife out of panic at extinction. For the author, that move breaks the argument itself with a theological absurdity: if the origin is imposition and the end is degradation, coherence demands accepting that there is no sovereignty anywhere along the way.

The conversation soon drifted into the realm of the absurd, with parodies of the book's title and calls to bump the message to keep it visible. The substance of the matter, however, remained intact: the tension between a lucidity that declares itself liberating and the observation that the one voicing it keeps eating, drinking and writing every morning. Is radical pessimism a form of lucidity, or just another way of decorating the cell?