It's a well-known resource. All paranormal incident movies use it, almost by definition, in their structure. Cinema loves, almost by definition, change, development and – I didn’t mean it, but yes – betrayal. And we all like fiction, and we are all narrated by a fiction, even the same variable, although we may not yet know what it will make us do, what it will convince us, who or what it will lead us to betray, while we remain equal to ourselves.

In the stories of the extraterrestrials, of the little girls possessed by the devil, of life after death, we will see the facts through the eyes of the skeptic, the unbeliever, the scientist to take us with him. This systematic campaign to discredit the critical attitude has always provoked intense anger in me. Someone, some international scientific committee of UNESCO, Javier Armentia, someone should take Hollywood to court. In fiction, the most far-fetched option usually prevails. For example, happiness. But that's for another day. This strategy determines how we perceive reality to the detriment.

They take advantage of the critique of the protagonist to give it credibility, but the ultimate goal – or collateral damage – is the discrediting of doubt, the compaction of a credible attitude. Said by Sexto Empirical: “Just as it is not impossible for a man who has gone up to a high place to get rid of a kick from the ladder that he has taken advantage of, it is not improbable that the skeptic, who has once proved his theses – with an argument that the evidence he has used in the form of a ladder does not exist, so to speak – should proceed to the destruction of his own argument.”

Everyone knows that, in order to conceive well of exorcism, you have to go to a priest who has lost his faith, that the smile of a child disassembles the old man’s eyelid, the indulgent poetry; that you have never believed in such cases before, but that seer invented you everything, including what you had just eaten and how much sleep, just by looking at the pupils of the eyes. Everyone knows that, in the same way that he knows that after walking and turning in this writing (if I am going to appeal to anyone in my favor) I will finally express a hopeful opinion, he knows that in order to turn any argument into an armored and unanswerable one, he has only resorted to what we might call the argument of the new believer or the argument ad conversum.

Would Christianity be successful if Paul of Tartsus had not witnessed his change of mind? The most brutal neoliberal, if he has fought in left-wing movements before, there is no one who can resist him. Those who have walked in ETA, ETA before, nationalism later, and finally denounced leftism, say that I –despite my efforts– will have a moral authority that I will never have.

I’m getting old, and one of my main fears about aging is that I now – with all the reason in the world – don’t have the beliefs that will take me, the enemies that I will give reason and example to. I’m not too dangerous yet, but I show what may be the first symptoms, not harmful yet, or at least I think so (and will I always think so?! ), Richard Wagner, whom I have hitherto hailed to my head, is the one I like to hear today. As a reader, you should also like Isoldes Liebstod.