There are moments when an apparently banal exchange reveals deeper tensions in contemporary culture. This is what happens with the recent controversy surrounding Matthieu Ricard —the “happiest man in the world”— and the article by Javier Cercas in El País[i], where he came to Ricard’s defense after the criticism expressed by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman[ii]. At first sight, the debate revolves around meditation, altruism, and personal happiness. But what is truly at stake is how we think about suffering and, above all, how certain European public figures structurally depoliticize injustice through a moral rhetoric of neutrality.
In 2014 I participated in a Summer Research program organized by Mind & Life Europe, the European branch of the foundation created decades earlier by the Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama and the scientist Francisco Varela. I had returned to Europe after four years teaching at the Universidad del Salvador, a period marked by my encounter with the philosophy of liberation and a heightened awareness of the historical responsibility of intellectuals. Ricard was one of the main guests. He had just returned from Chile and enthusiastically presented his proposal for an Inner Revolution, inviting us to cultivate inner transformation as the decisive way to change the world.
After his talk, I approached him to ask whether it had not been problematic to speak of an “inner revolution” in a country still grappling with the legacy of the 1973 military coup: a seventeen-year dictatorship, the establishment of a regime that functioned as an early laboratory of neoliberalism, and—still in 2014—persistent expressions of structural inequality and injustice. I pointed out that, in that context, the appeal to spiritual transformation could acquire ambiguous meanings, especially when historical wounds remained open and when economic, social, and cultural violence continued to shape the daily life of millions.
His reaction was evasive. But what was most revealing was not his answer, but the underlying logic of his discourse: social suffering was reduced to a matter of interiority, to what Ricard calls mindprint—the sum of individuals’ motivations, visions, and mental dispositions. Within this framework, historical processes—state violence, structural inequality, the neoliberal laboratory into which Chile was turned after 1973—blurred into a kind of moral backdrop. What was in fact a web of political and economic forces appeared reinterpreted as a deficit of inner clarity, as if social transformation depended primarily on adjusting our attitudes rather than confronting the structures that produce injustice.
To this we must add something I consider fundamental. I am among those who believe that politics requires us to pay attention to our motivations and to be faithful to our visions of the good; public action cannot be divorced from moral integrity. But I am not naïve enough to believe that transforming ourselves individually is sufficient to produce a more just world. History shows, time and again, that private virtue can coexist without friction with the most ominous forms of exploitation and domination; that individual morality, even when sincere, does not guarantee justice, nor does it by itself alter the structures that produce inequality and suffering. There is no way to dissociate one dimension from the other: without inner motivation, there is no political commitment, but without structural transformation, ethics becomes a luxury of the privileged. The difficulty in Ricard’s discourse— as we shall see— is precisely his tendency to reduce injustice to a problem of inner clarity and to downplay, if not ignore, the historical and material dimensions of harm.
An anecdote that illuminates Ricard’s ethical model comes from a series of conversations the Dalai Lama held with scientists, intellectuals, and activists engaged with the climate crisis. These sessions, held at his official residence in McLeod Ganj, in Dharamsala, brought together specialists from various disciplines to examine the relationship between ethics, ecology, and global responsibility. In one of the sessions, devoted to exploring the difference between “ecological footprint” and “handprint,” and assessing rigorous tools to measure environmental impact, sustainability researcher Gregory Norris presented a detailed analysis of how to quantify harm and design structural interventions to mitigate the climate crisis. It was in this context—focused on systemic metrics and public policy— that Ricard introduced the anecdote of the Mars heir, referring to the American family-owned corporation known for its confectionery products—M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way—and as one of the world’s largest private food companies.
When Norris concluded his presentation, Ricard took the floor and shifted the focus of the session toward a different terrain: individual motivation. Instead of continuing to examine the structural dynamics that produce ecological impacts, he offered a story that—according to him—demonstrated that authentic transformation begins in the interior sphere. He recounted the experience of the owner of Mars, the multimillionaire heir who, he claimed, had adopted a triple bottom line model—people, planet, profit—and voluntarily reduced the company’s profit margins to improve working conditions in Ghana and lessen its environmental impact. For Ricard, this gesture illustrated what he calls mindprint: the “mental footprint” or inner disposition that precedes all ethical action. In his interpretation, when the inner vision is correct—compassionate, lucid— even those in positions of immense economic power can redirect their practices and generate meaningful transformations in the world[iii].
However, when the Dalai Lama intervened next, he did not respond to the example itself but to the conceptual framework that sustained it. He returned to the original axis of the conversation—the systemic analysis of ecological suffering—and offered an observation that, without explicit confrontation, corrected Ricard:
“From a broader perspective,” he said, “capitalism, with its emphasis on profit and greed, creates enormous problems. If we think of other socioeconomic theories, such as Marxism or socialism, at least in their ideal form, they are more concerned with collective well-being.”
The Dalai Lama’s intervention is gentle in form but forceful in content. He does not question the goodwill of the businessman mentioned by Ricard, but shifts the conversation back to the level Ricard had left aside: structure. Where Ricard proposes a moral model centered on individual motivation, the Dalai Lama reminds us that ecological, social, and economic problems cannot be understood without attending to the systemic conditions that generate suffering. And he adds a crucial nuance: the fact that regimes calling themselves socialist have destroyed ecosystems or reproduced authoritarianism does not invalidate the ideal, but shows how ideologies can be instrumentalized for political control when they are not embodied in just practices. What he is saying, in truth, is that without transforming economic and political forms of organization—without a critique of the logic of accumulation and corporate power—no individual intention, however luminous or sincere, is sufficient[iv].
Far from the spiritual neutrality with which he is often associated in the West, the Dalai Lama’s intervention is a reminder that compassion without politics is a pretext. It is also an indirect refutation of the ease with which Ricard tends to treat the relationship between ethics and structure.
This becomes particularly evident in the Chilean context. Many of Ricard’s Chilean disciples—just as happened with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela—reproduce a particular form of equidistance: they place the constitutional government of Allende and the military dictatorship on the same plane, as if they were two “symmetrical mistakes.” This reading is not a political opinion; it is the result of an ontology. The theory of operational closure—of which both scientists were pioneers—tends, when transferred to the social realm, to neutralize alterity and dissolve conflict: injustice becomes “perturbation,” violence becomes “mismatch,” and history becomes a problem of observation[v].
Ricard, from another register, reproduces that same movement. His idea of “inner revolution”—celebrated by European cultural elites as well as their Latin American neocolonial counterparts—shifts social transformation toward the perfection of the individual mind. And he does so through a language that, by depoliticizing suffering, renders it culturally acceptable, aesthetically luminous, and morally comfortable: a suffering without history, without structures, and without perpetrators, reduced to a matter of vision or inner disposition.
It is at this point that Javier Cercas enters. In El País, in an article titled “La verdad sobre el monje Ricard,” Cercas responds to Bregman, whose own piece—“The happiest man on earth, a Buddhist monk, did nothing for others”—had appeared a few days earlier in the same newspaper. Cercas’s rhetorical strategy is subtle but transparent: he shifts the structural critique toward a debate about individual virtue. Would personal happiness not be a condition for collective happiness? Has Ricard not dedicated enough effort to others through books, photographs, or humanitarian projects?
The problem is not Cercas’s defense of Ricard. The problem is the intellectual model he activates to do so. Cercas turns a political critique—the systematic omission of structural injustice in contemporary spiritual discourse—into a moral examination of individual virtue. This displacement, which presents neutrality as lucidity and moderation as depth, coincides with a broader pattern in his public intervention: the tendency to shield certain cultural figures through a language that claims to be “balanced” or “nuanced,” but in practice reinforces strongly ideological positions.
This is precisely the case with Mario Vargas Llosa. For years, Cercas has praised and defended the Peruvian novelist not only for his literary work but—decisively—as an ethical and political reference point. In his book El hechicero de la tribu. Mario Vargas Llosa y el liberalismo en América Latina, Argentine political scientist Atilio Borón dismantles the role of the Nobel laureate as an organic intellectual of Latin American neoliberalism. The book’s prologue, written by Ana María Ramb, helps to clarify the ideological logic involved. Ramb describes Vargas Llosa as a “sorcerer,” not because of his narrative talent but because of his cultural function: an intellectual who acts as a legitimizer of the neoliberal order, in sharp contrast with the critical tradition of Zola, Cortázar, or García Lorca. Far from adopting a position committed to justice or emancipation, Vargas Llosa operates—as Ramb argues—as an elegant spokesperson for a system that perpetuates domination in Latin America[vi]. His figure fulfills a precise task: naturalizing actually existing capitalism, presenting inequality as an “inevitable” effect of progress, and neutralizing any political imagination aimed at transformation[vii].
This characterization illuminates Cercas’s perspective. His moral defense of Ricard repeats, on a different scale, the same movement of ideological neutralization that Borón identifies in the case of the Peruvian writer. What appears as nuance, prudence, or balance is not neutrality; it is a form of concealment. It is a way of translating historical, economic, and social conflicts into dilemmas of character, replacing structural critique with a comforting moral pedagogy.
The first chapter of El hechicero de la tribu makes this clear: Vargas Llosa is not simply a novelist with political opinions, but a cultural operator of neoliberalism, someone whose trajectory—as Borón shows—moves from early enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution to an almost religious adherence to the market, accompanied by a systematic rejection of all forms of critical thinking. Borón reconstructs this trajectory as a process of ideological transfiguration: from young communist to militant liberal, from committed writer to an agent who, from the vantage point of literary prestige, legitimizes privatizations, shock policies, structural inequalities, and even coups d’état. His public interventions, analyzed by Borón in detail, do not seek to understand historical processes but to neutralize them, turning social conflict into a matter of mentality, individual responsibility, or civic morality[viii].
This operation—the displacement of the structural toward the moral—is exactly what Cercas reproduces in his defense of Ricard. In both cases, suffering is relocated to the realm of interiority, while the historical causes that produce it fade from view. Injustice appears as a problem of attitudes or personal values, while the structures of exploitation, inequality, and political violence fall into the background or become invisible. The figure of the intellectual is thereby reduced to a work of harmonization rather than critique, to a pedagogy of virtue rather than a confrontation with the order that generates harm.
But this gesture is not accidental: it corresponds to an intellectual infrastructure that, in the case of Vargas Llosa, has a precise lineage. His long-standing membership in the Mont Pelerin Society—the circle founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—places him within the most influential tradition of contemporary neoliberalism. From the perspective reconstructed by Philip Mirowski, the Mont Pelerin Society was not merely an academic forum but a transnational laboratory dedicated to reconfiguring modern common sense, bringing together economists, philosophers, jurists, and business leaders to produce a new regime of truth: the idea that individual freedom is only viable within a deregulated market order, and that any state intervention in defense of equality constitutes a civilizational threat[ix].
It is important to emphasize that this reading does not diminish Vargas Llosa’s literary work, whose quality and aesthetic significance are not under discussion here, just as Ricard’s religious commitment and monastic dedication are not at issue. My analysis is limited to the place both occupy in the contemporary intellectual constellation and to the ways certain ethical, political, and epistemological orientations are articulated in their public interventions. Distinguishing between literary or spiritual production and ideological positioning is indispensable to avoid confusing heterogeneous planes and, simultaneously, to understand how certain configurations of cultural authority can function as unwitting vectors of legitimation for the dominant order.
Philip Mirowski has shown in detail how this group operated as a network of strategic thought intended to: (1) dismantle the intellectual legitimacy of the welfare state; (2) turn the market into an ontological and moral principle; and (3) train a generation of “organic intellectuals” capable of transmitting this creed into the public sphere. Vargas Llosa— as Borón notes—plays this role perfectly: he translates the doctrine of the Mont Pelerin Society into the language of moderation and common sense, turning an architecture of economic domination into an ethics of individual responsibility.
This process cannot be understood without considering the institutional infrastructure that accompanied the neoliberal project. Mirowski has demonstrated that this network did not merely produce ideas: it built mechanisms of consecration, designed prizes, reinforced academic hierarchies, and created international devices to grant epistemic authority to its representatives. The paradigmatic example is the so-called “Nobel Prize in Economics”—created in 1968 by the Swedish Central Bank—whose purpose was not to recognize a consolidated scientific field, but to provide public legitimacy to a particular vision of economics, closely linked to the tradition of Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Stigler, and Becker. This operation in symbolic engineering transformed a prize that is not part of the original Nobel legacy into a global instrument of consecration, sealing before the public the naturalness of the market, competitive rationality, and the notion that economics is an exact science separate from history and politics.
The case of Vargas Llosa must be read within that same logic. His international visibility—including the Nobel Prize in Literature—forms part of the cultural ecosystem in which the institutions that grant prestige often, without stating it explicitly, consecrate a neoliberal horizon that equates freedom with markets, subjectivity with entrepreneurial selfhood, and inequality with a moral problem. The way Vargas Llosa presents himself as an heir to Hayek—to whom he dedicates one of the central chapters in La llamada de la tribu—aligns with this movement: it is not only intellectual affinity but inscription within a global institutional constellation that recognizes, rewards, and amplifies voices capable of translating the neoliberal worldview into the language of democratic liberal culture[x].
Here the transition to Cercas becomes clear. The defense that the Spanish novelist offers of Ricard reproduces, in miniature, the same grammar: the substitution of history by psychology, of structure by virtue, of conflict by nuance. What in Vargas Llosa operates as a political-cultural machinery—institutions, think tanks, networks of influence, organizations such as the International Foundation for Liberty[xi]—in Cercas becomes a discursive reflex: the rhetorical gesture of turning every material dispute into an exercise in moral deliberation.
When Cercas defends Vargas Llosa—as when he defends Ricard—he is not simply vindicating a body of work or a biography. He is preserving a symbolic position: the position of the intellectual who presents himself as neutral but whose neutrality functions to protect the ideological center of cultural neoliberalism. A neutrality that speaks against extremes but not against inequality; that celebrates moderation but not justice; that is moved by the beauty of inner serenity but not by structural suffering.
Cercas and Ricard form, in this sense, a perfect mirror. One spiritualizes politics; the other aestheticizes neutrality. Both shift the question of suffering toward moral interiority. And both consolidate, without saying so, a cultural pedagogy in which real conflict disappears beneath the polished surface of private virtue.
Against this tendency, the philosophy of liberation—from Dussel to Fanon, from Ambedkar to Federici—reminds us that politics begins where neutrality becomes impossible. That suffering is not a “perturbation” or a “motivation,” but the effect of structures that privilege some and dispossess others. That ethics is not self-realization, but responsibility toward the victim. That happiness without a world is a comfortable fiction.
This is where the Dalai Lama’s intervention acquires its full meaning. It is not a spiritual anecdote; it is a reminder. Human suffering is not alleviated by mental states alone. It is alleviated through justice. And that requires transforming structures, not only consciences.
The question, therefore, is not whether Ricard is altruistic, nor whether Cercas is right to defend him. The question is another: what kind of culture do we want to produce in a world devastated by inequality, ecological crisis, and structural violence. A culture that celebrates the inner serenity of the privileged, or a culture that listens to the truth of suffering and recognizes its historical origin. Neutrality— that quintessential European virtue— is not a refuge. It is a political position. And like any position, it has consequences.
Notes
[i] Javier Cercas, “The Truth About the Monk Ricard,” El País, Ideas section. https://elpais.com/eps/2025-11-08/la-verdad-sobre-el-monje-ricard.html
[ii] Rutger Bregman, “The Happiest Man in the World, a Buddhist Monk, Didn’t Lift a Finger for Others,” El País, Ideas section. https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-10-14/el-hombre-mas-feliz-del-mundo-un-monje-budista-no-movio-un-dedo-por-los-demas-a-que-dedicaras-tu-tu-larga-carrera.html
[iii] Dunne, J. D., & Goleman, D. (Eds.). (2017). Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence: The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading Thinkers on Climate Change (pp. 101). Wisdom Publications.
[iv] Dunne, J. D., & Goleman, D. (Eds.). (2017). Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence: The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading Thinkers on Climate Change (pp. 102). Wisdom Publications.
[v] In a conversation with Cornelius Castoriadis, Francisco Varela justified his political neutrality in the following way: he distinguished between the position he occupies as a scientist and the one he exercises as a citizen, noting that scientific work operates on a methodological plane that requires prudence and distance from any taking of sides. According to Varela, biology and the theory of autonomy cannot, in themselves, produce a politics; their categories belong to a different level from the one that governs collective action and institutions. For that reason —he maintained— political intervention must rely on a civic intuition, not on the models or hypotheses that science develops to describe life.
But this distinction, legitimate on the epistemological plane, becomes problematic when it is used to justify a broader neutrality that also includes the public sphere. What is then confused are two heterogeneous registers: that of the methodological neutrality that science requires in order to understand certain phenomena, and that of the political responsibility incumbent upon every citizen in the face of historical injustice. As some Buddhist traditions also suggest, it is a confusion between conventional truth —which governs ethics, action, and concrete suffering— and ultimate truth —which guides inquiry into mind and experience. The neutrality required for the latter cannot become an alibi for suspending the former. See Castoriadis, C. (2011). Life and creation. In G. Rockhill (Ed. & Trans.), Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis (pp. 58–73). Continuum.
[vi] The chronicles that Mario Vargas Llosa wrote after his trips to Palestine in 2005 and 2015 —published in El País and later collected in Israel/Palestina. Paz o guerra santa— constitute a paradigmatic example of the gaze that turns a colonial conflict into a symmetrical moral drama. In Los justos (2005), the writer describes the occupation in terms of “fanaticisms on both sides,” “irreconcilable neighbors,” and “human tragedies,” categories that, far from naming the structure of domination, reinscribe violence within a grammar of “two demons” that dehistoricizes the conflict and dissolves the radical asymmetry between an occupied population and a State that exercises a systematic policy of colonization, segregation, and dispossession.
Although Vargas Llosa acknowledges the existence of abuses, the figure of the Israeli “just” —journalists, activists, and academics who denounce the occupation— functions as an ethical axis that reorganizes the reading: the colonial structure disappears, replaced by a narrative of individual conscience, moral courage, and testimony. The political question is replaced by the category of character. Domination is turned into an ethical landscape.
In 2016, Juan Cruz’s report on the Nobel laureate’s trip to Hebron reinforces this framework. Cruz emphasizes Vargas Llosa’s dedication to the craft of reporting —the notebook, the listening, the testimonial will— and even includes the praise of Gideon Levy, a central figure in critical Israeli journalism. But the narrative is once again organized around a humanist matrix: the conflict appears as a duel of “hatreds” and “wounds,” a moral confrontation between equivalent subjects. The colonial structure is reabsorbed into the aesthetics of balance. Palestinian suffering becomes narrative material; State violence becomes landscape.
Read in light of the later genocide in Gaza, this framework acquires a more precise meaning: the liberal aesthetics of equidistance produces a systematic erasure of the material and historical conditions that generate harm. What is presented as journalistic impartiality is, in reality, a device of political neutralization. Occupation ceases to be an apartheid regime and becomes a human drama whose solution would depend on goodwill, individual ethics, or the awakening of conscience.
This operation coincides with the move that Javier Cercas reproduces in his defense of Matthieu Ricard. In both cases, structural critique is displaced toward a moral pedagogy; historical conflict is turned into a dilemma of character; political violence is softened into a problem of sensibilities, motivations, or attitudes. It is, in essence, an ideological gesture: converting injustice into a matter of interiority. Vargas Llosa practices it in the register of the great reporter; Cercas in the register of the literary intellectual. The result is the same: suffering is aestheticized and depoliticized. See Cruz, J. (2016, June 30). Vargas Llosa cuenta “los estragos de la ocupación” [Documentary video]. El País. https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/06/29/actualidad/1467229536_250513.html; Vargas Llosa, M. (2005, July 30). Los justos. El País. https://elpais.com/diario/2005/07/30/ultima/1122664802_850215.html; Vargas Llosa, M. (2006). Israel, Palestina: Paz o guerra santa. Aguilar.
[vii] Ramb, A. M. (2019). Prologue. In A. A. Borón, El hechicero de la tribu. Mario Vargas Llosa y el liberalismo en América Latina (pp. xi–xiv). Ediciones Akal México.
[viii] Boron, A. (2019). El hechicero de la tribu. Mario Vargas Llosa y el liberalismo en América Latina. Ediciones Akal México, pp. 11–32.
[ix] The chapter that Mario Vargas Llosa devotes to Hayek in La llamada de la tribu constitutes an explicit defense of Hayekian liberalism as an epistemology and as a normative horizon. There he adopts without reservation Hayek’s central thesis that no authority can gather the dispersed knowledge necessary to direct a complex society, and that therefore every attempt at “deliberate construction” leads to coercion. This idea is articulated through the distinction between nomos —the spontaneous order that arises from unplanned practices such as the market, law, or language— and taxis, the constructed order, characterized by intentionality and, for Hayek, by the inevitable ignorance that accompanies all state planning. Vargas Llosa associates this nomos with freedom, legality, individualism, private property, free markets, human rights, and peace, presenting it as the foundation of modern civilization.
The chapter also highlights Hayek’s role as founder of the Mont Pelerin Society, conceived as an intellectual nucleus aimed at containing the advance of collectivism in the postwar era. Vargas Llosa reads this gesture as a moral commitment to the cause of freedom and acknowledges its influence on his own political trajectory. However, the identification between spontaneous order and freedom proposed by Hayek —and reproduced by Vargas Llosa— conceals a critical point: the policies inspired by this epistemology, from Chile in 1973 to multiple structural adjustment programs, required strong, often authoritarian states to impose the institutional conditions of the market. The paradox is evident: liberalism presented as a condition for human rights was historically supported by the systematic suspension of those same rights. This tension is not external to the theory, but inherent to the conceptual device that turns every public intervention into a “constructivist mirage” and every structure of exploitation into a supposedly “spontaneous” product of human cooperation. See Vargas Llosa, M. (2018). La llamada de la tribu. Alfaguara.
[x] On the epistemic and institutional structure of the neoliberal project, see the analyses of Philip Mirowski. In “Defining Neoliberalism,” the author reconstructs the Mont Pelerin Society as a “thought collective” oriented toward producing an order where the market operates as a principle of truth and the State is reconfigured to secure competition as a form of life. See Mirowski, P. (2009). Defining neoliberalism. In P. Mirowski & D. Plehwe (Eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (pp. 417–455). Harvard University Press. In “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize,” Mirowski shows how the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics was conceived as a legitimation device intended to consecrate neoliberal orthodoxy as science, reinforcing academic hierarchies that favored figures from the Hayek–Friedman circle. These institutional mechanisms allow us to understand, on a broader level, the dynamics through which intellectuals like Vargas Llosa have been incorporated into and celebrated within cultural spaces that naturalize the neoliberal ideology under the guise of literary universality or analytical neutrality. See Mirowski, P. (2020). The neoliberal ersatz Nobel Prize. In D. Plehwe, Q. Slobodian & P. Mirowski (Eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (pp. 243–280). Verso.
[xi] The International Foundation for Liberty (FIL), created and chaired by Mario Vargas Llosa since 2003, is an Ibero-American think tank organized around the global neoliberal ideology —in the tradition of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Atlas Network— whose stated objective is to defend the “free market,” combat “populism,” and promote public policies oriented toward deregulation, fiscal austerity, and the reduction of the welfare state. Its board and associated networks bring together central figures of transatlantic conservative liberalism: José María Aznar (Fundación FAES), Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Enrique Ghersi, Andrés Pastrana, Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera, and contemporary references such as Axel Kaiser (Fundación para el Progreso, Chile) or Héctor Schamis. FIL maintains operational ties with Latin American think tanks such as CEDICE Libertad (Venezuela), Fundación Libertad (Argentina), and Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), as well as with Spanish business networks.
© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
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