Geopolitical discourses in the Americas

 

Geopolitical discourses in the Americas

My positional statement about the region: my assessment

The spiritual atrophy of our culture created room for these fragmented forms of philofascism. I would not talk of fascism: there is no ideology or attempt to replace the system for another one. It is a rebellion to the limits of the system. That's one of the reasons why it seduces people and, of course, Argentinians. In Argentina the crisis of the state also opened the way to right wing philoanarchist discourses. Milei monopolized the discoure of freedom which included (besides pandemics and the locked horizons) the limits of a tale and political agendas that the opposition tried to make hegemonic not reflecting the long term density of a culture. Partial memories generated a return of the repressed. Populism did his share.

In the last decades we gained an appreciation for individual freedom losing security, new identitarian alternatives emerged and now nowhere you can certainly affirm that you are at home, sound and safe. The raise of individual freedom tends to coincide with the raise of collective impotence. There is a conection between the absence of law and the glorification of individual freedom that anarchism knows well, that's why neoliberalism in Argentina extended like nowhere else in the 90s being an example for the world: it was only pssible due to a strong anarchist matrix in our culture that also partially sustained peronism.

We live in cultures of war and symbolic violence, of psicological bullying in everyday life, of the fall of the public citizen. When violence becomes a form of identification a culture of violence emerges. I refer to a cult of violence in relation to images and representations that group and collective identities are built upon. Identities of violence are all those that recur to conflict as a unique source. A culture of violence where the limits between licit and non-licit are not clear, culture that attracts inmoral individuals and institutions interested economically and politically in war stages.

Passions that have been cooled down reemerge with a radical violence getting closer to the borders of madness. We changed the the pubic good for the freedom of pursuing individual satisfaction. The tendency to self-praise of some political leaders talks of a defective evaluation mechanism that has made agressions more likely and conflicts more expensive. War is carried on by people that have an optimum opinion of themselves, an excessive confidence and the illusion of control. And whoever is in a position of power sees his inclination to contemplate others' points of views diminished. Some religions predicate love inside the group and genocide hatred outside of it, like it happens with all those groups considered the “chosen one”, with a totalizing and privileged vision of the world. In this way corruption and death have been justified in history.

I will be provocative in this Salon Lacan from the very beginning: Is it possible to think that decades of psychoanalitical practices and what today is called personal coaching could have unknowinlgy helped as narratives that take care, above all, of the self? The encouragement to personal interests has eroded our sense of belonging to a community. The cultural trasnformations have weakened the image of the “Us” that allows to tie webs of trust and social cooperation.

So the problem is not about lefts or rights. It is cultural and manifested in the arrogance and impunity of an ignorance that crosses all over the political rainbow.It also lies in the incapacity to distinguish fantasy from reality, it is a problem of “not knowing and not being able to read”, very serious in times of an educational tragedy and brutalization. Critical judgment and competence are forbiden as a presumption from who feels superior and we reward adventurers. The culture of work and study is lost.

Politics are used for criminal purposes and the political class uses the system to personally enrich themselves. This eroded confidence in the State and in politics. Democracy is threatened by this. Borders between crime, business and politics have become blurred. Banks allow corrupt statemen and criminals to hide vast amounts of money while they reinforce the power and influence of the actors that use them. There is a symbiotic relation between elites and criminal groups that enjoy the banking system's lack of transparency. The perception that scammers and thieves govern the world grew, and also did distrust towards politics.

We live in meaningless times without commitments and with truth standards that fall apart. Cinicism in front of ethical idealism is a reaction to our present reality and to the tragic way in which ideals were destroyed by political leaders. These have been buried under centuries of teachings that tied good life to richness and acquisition. And Milei translated the vital energy and rebeliouness of change before the ruling sociocultural nihilism.

We are under a mode of domination founded in the institution of insecurity, based on the precariousness, “uncertainty”, “insecurity” and “vulnerability” of existence: the feeling of instability associated to the dissapearence of fixed points where to situate trust.

In disquietude, many of us live in a terrible anxiety and a feeling of no way out, anguished, sad, and in fear.

Horizons and challenges: my prognosis

We must move from lament to challenge. Sometimes you have to visit Hell in order to understand and purge evil. I think new violent wars can be expected, and probably a new pandemics. And may be one of these catastrophes to come or both will be the point of departure of a new planetary citizenship, given the absence of political and intellectual ambition in this regard. But for now it is likely that hackers capacity to work with governments in order to manipulate political processes will grow while personal identities are used by control government agencies: the crime underworld is not disconnected from the business and political world.

We should never stop checking who benefits from the crack and the conflict: the relation between conflict and crime is circular: their actors fuse and our failure to solve conflict increases the dinamics with crime. That's why we are urged more to find common grounds than a common enemy if we want the future not to look so dark. We face today an apocalypse without vision or perspective.

A good life will only reappear recreating language and our world with new expressions that allow a way out (at least an imaginary one but may be not only due to the creative power of poetry) from these hellish days and their entropy. But we can only find way outs inside what we already are.

We need to found imaginary eras against the vulgarity of history. We need to imagine a new international movement “without party, country, nacional community or citizenship”.

There is a history of other “libertarian” traditions, older and very different. The Christian one stressing brotherhood (think of Tolstoy's anarchism) and the greek one asking for a world citizenship. Those traditions remind us that all the world should be our home, that there would be no foreigners anywhere, or passports or visas impeding free circulation. An ecological libertarian utopia would also be possible in these times. We need another narrative to generate new institutions according to the drastic technological and social changes experienced. We should reconnect the experience with some non consumerist or fundamentalist moral horizon. Difficult it is to keep the horizon when we gave our back to a critical culture as an orienting compass in a world devoided of meaning and instead adopted a prosthesis culture in which medicine often sickens us and school often brutalizes us. What happens to us is the result of the absence of a project, model, ideas and will to rebuild.

History and poetry should copulate in order to recover humanity and protect a world where dialogue can survive. There are no perspectives if we do not foster the emergence of sociopoetic forces with enough power to go in another direction. And we should not lose hope. Things that might look very bad can have very good results.

We have to rethink how culture acts through passion, what happens with our capacity to be affected. Only giving visibility to these passions, finding a dialogue between private and public passions we can rediscover meaning. We will need to translate our tensions and discords, listen to the passional confessions of ever more solitary people, and give them an expression to allow them to skirt the precipices towards which they slide. We need to give visivility to those passions that tend to get lost.

The very meaning of what is human is at stake. We urgently need a convivential reconstruction, of the house and of ourselves. And we are urged to recover the emotional as a fundamental realm of the humane.

We need a planetary feeling and a cosmopolitan tradition to survive, threatened as it is today in the world, one that believes that our own culture gets richer asking itself about itself, feeding from different civilizations.

There will be no future without a gigantic cultural reform. No serious projects in this regard are visualized in any political sector. We need to create a new culture enrichened with the experience of centuries. Our contemporary challenges come above all from the cultural changes that are taking place and from our emotional education. New cultural leaders must invent what can be done and modify the way in which we see possibilities. Political forces know the importance of the cultural question, its potential to transform, its capacity to generate experiences and an imaginary that could allow the community to expand its possibilites of action.

Possible actions: interventions

We need new forms of actions while old collective beliefs are put into question. Hamlet's despair emerged from a lack of faith in language and in himself, so he couldn't act. When you see the “thick of things”, the nausea inhibits you from an action since you feel that nothing would change. Knowledge kills action that requires the veils of illusion. We need to examine and know ourselves but a moral life is related to good deeds, in the sphere of action, not contemplation. Connect: You cannot have a moral life isolated from society. We need societies where people are encouraged to act virtuously. But in cities pregnant of own self interest, spaces that are mere agregations of mutually hostile individuals, the seeds for mutual trust fight for survival. The cynical vision says that selfish interest is below any ethical action. But many of us act ethically in circumstances that don't explain this. Admiting the responsibility for our actions...a philosopher called that auhtenticity. We need a more humble relation with the Being: notions like the I, the soul, the individual gave room to a very selfish mode of thinking.

We need to create a new shared song to portrait our planetary risk. But these people are the only ones offering a “utopic” vision, another reason why the are attractive. Those interested in beating this guys should not allow them to own utopia and freedom as values, difficult things when the other candidates cannot hold any utopias. Politics should listen to the hidden ailments in the minds and bodies to generate them a new narrative.

We left linguistic and civic courage in the hands of illiterate rogues and, as a consequence, politics and its languages are no longer what they were or what they should be. Strangely, because of our ignorance, we seem not to be afraid of this, which is still more dangerous. We are afraid of these trends but we are not afraid enough of these trends. We see and hear evil but don't do anything or not enough to stop it, surrendered to the horrifying sensation of a world that nobody controls and cannot even be controlled.

We need to learn to feel, think and act at planetary level. More careful acctions can be the way of a responsability of another form of being in the world to help us see ourselves as part of a planetary identity.

If it is ok to keep a cinical and humorous look to face a kitsch reality, perhaps we should also recover a tragic look to restitute the dignity of the events. When new forms of private and public violence appear, we have to auscultate passions inmediately. Politics should translate these passions and give them other expressions.

A new sentimental education is needed, new institutions for it are needed. We need political forces to act as agents of cultural change, as educators. To put ourselves in other people's shoes must be part of the basic education. Being aware of deceit and self-deceit will allow us to defend ourselves and fight in us these tendencies, and be smarter in regard to the fictions we tell ourselves.

We need to replace a conflictive model for a cooperative model for the social, having empathy instead of violence as motor of the individual action. Literature teaches sympathy with the other, increases our capacity for compassion.

We have freedom not to believe in authority, and more importantly, to declare that we don't believe. Dominant images of authority invite to these rejections, they lack the element of protection. So when you see evil, reject it, report it, do something to stop it. Be a Rebel, like they are. They stole rebellion as a value from us, as they did with freedom and adventure. We need rebellious, adventurous and free people to try superior ways of life.

We also need different ways of living. We need to recover the notion of care as alternative to the technological attitude. A life oriented to Being, to dwell on earth, a poetic life. We are a footprint but also were Socrates, Saint Francis, Tolstoi, Thoreau, Gandhi.. What kind of footprint will you be?

Exalting poetry as an act in these difficult days can look like a provocation. Because for some it might not illuminate or have value when priorities seem different. But maybe this time requires poetic courage. If meaning has stopped illuminating the world, a shapeless future asks for poetry not to surrender so easily, to recover there the question about meaning, a search for beauty, even an act of faith for those who feel the imminence of a presence. And there poetry can attempt to reunite what has been separated: us. Fostering poetically meaningful values is perhaps indispensable. For those actions, we need to produce that spontaneous suspention of disbelief that for Coleridge constituted the poetic faith.