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This book is an essay that explores perversion and corruption—in both their individual and collective expressions—in the exercise of public and private life and in the use of power as a factor of seduction, persuasion, or extorsion to manage the will of another. Its incisive style explores the labyrinth of networks of Western power in recent years, posing simple yet penetrating questions: Why does a person who believes in and promises to carry out a given political project agree to move forward with anti-democratic and corrupt proposals once in a position of power? What is the essence of this mysterious power, so able to disrupt a person's behaviour? And why doesn't the population of a country rebel, why does it so passively agree to be used, deceived, entrapped, and dispossessed by a minority? And at the end of the book: Why do the media lend themselves to these manoeuvres or engage in this corrupt collusion, “becoming means of mass persuasion and propaganda and channels for crude manipulations of the population”? (11) These questions create an outline for the book, which begins as a study of the media and then dives into two negative processes, which Tizón defines as psychopolitical: the de-symbolisation of fear and the de-sublimation of aggression. His theses are based on a theory of basic emotions—fear, anger, revulsion, distaste—and on a hypothesis of the relational systems of emotional exchange—curiosity, seeking, the pursuit of knowledge, longings of pleasure and of joy, anger, rage, fleeing from revulsion, etc. He thus “seeks to find a modern form, more in accordance with current scientific knowledge, a more complex but possibly more real, more all-encompassing blueprint.” (42)
According to Tizón, the media of late modernity manipulate the public emotionally:
They control, organise, and disseminate products based on the mass and crass use of petty topics and personal intimacies, dreadful reality shows—voyeuristic/scopophilic in their form or their deliquescen