Message to the inhabitants of a country in crisis

Sometimes the changes in this world bring crisis, since crisis in turn stirs the urgency for change to emerge. This is how the road leads to its destination: whoever strays from it falls into the ravine, where there is no option but to get back on course.

The history of a country usually begins when a gang of greedy kings corrupted some army of human beings —who, like you and me, did not argue—, and won a war by slaughtering and subjugating the native families of these lands. After arbitrarily marking out an imaginary fragmentation of the land, drawing maps they declared official, they imposed on their new subjects an aggressive system of absolutism called education.

The history takes hold when we, tamed under this decree, agree to identify with their colored flags and their misguided anthems, load onto our backs the wearisome dead weight of patriotism, meekness and hope disguised as moral principles, fall shamefully before their personality-cult images with nationalist voices, and so limit our capacity for empathy to the idiosyncrasy sown in our own tribe, no longer tolerating any other possible thought. In this way, those kings win our stray loyalty, exploit our labor, seize our resources and, along the way, earn our personal recognition.

Modern revolutions arrive in this world, every one of them failing at what it demanded but achieving resounding success at what it covertly sought. Consumerism arrives, industrialization, overpopulation and globalization, and this world explodes and turns into a mass. Cities bury the living fields and the damp meadows under piles of cold cement and gray asphalt. The kings who trampled their subordinates are swapped for presidents, ministers and congressmen who keep on trampling, backed by the same hierarchy of popular permissiveness. War, trivialized by soulless technology, loses the sense of honor that once gave it some meaning. Slavery changes its name to payroll, and class division spreads as a tool of manipulation, offering the illusion of power and wealth to some and to others nothing but envy and helplessness.

In a modern country one does not govern by force alone; one also governs by fanning the propaganda that one is not governing by force. The atrocious art of politics consists of psychological deceit, the technique we call “brainwashing,” better known as “partisanship,” or more generally, “telling us what we want to hear,” very effective on the sleeping masses.

When we lack self-respect, are ignorant of our innate abilities and have forgotten our essence, we then look to obey whoever offers to lead us. Perhaps some charismatic figure whose promises give us the feeling that we will fill the void our soul weeps over holds not only our most stubborn loyalty —which alone kindles in this world the spark of human blindness and stupidity—, but, worse still, proclaims us absolved of our responsibility as living beings born free in this world.

Two forces usually move within us: the desire for freedom and the fear of it. One pushes us to draw the sword and the other convinces us to senselessly run ourselves through with it. One makes us shout “Revolution!” and the other bows our heads in submission to those who made it. Then they shout “Opposition!” and we bend again, now before those who opposed. We read sadistically sensationalist advertising and defend it as a saving truth, and in doing so we take refuge in the prison of its hypnotic falsehood and in the hatred that furiously inspires us to fold our arms and do nothing.

“Democracy,” we hear, and we gullibly celebrate its holidays. “The people,” it rings out, and we blush like gringos because they deign to mention us. “Enemy,” they point, and tangled in such a sorcerer’s yarn, we loathe him. “Elections,” they say, and we muddle ourselves into believing the incoherence that by going out to vote we are choosing our destiny.

No, our terror of choosing is far too great. We would a thousand times rather someone else did it. We don’t care whether that someone does it well, as long as he talks to us about thrilling ideals and blue dawns. We don’t ask that those who govern be honest, upright or intelligent. We don’t even stop to check whether those to whom we are handing our sacred freedom have had even the modest strength to keep from crumbling, wrapped in the black mire of politics, where by the law of gravity the most twisted hypocrisies and the most putrid evils of the human being settle.

And the thing is, even after knowing all this, we keep prostrating ourselves before them. We hoist them onto the altar of our media screens, pay them our sweat-soaked tributes, chant along with their costly, repetitive and polluting election campaigns, and even disown the brother who dares not join us in that same frenzy.

Right now a thief is breaking into our home, the battlefield that life wisely assigned us, and in response we kneel before him, abandoned to whatever lies, insults and threats it suits him to voice, taking advantage of the unbending authority we gifted him.

What on earth are we doing — have we stopped to think?

“It’s just that the thief is sitting in the armchair of that luxurious palace,” we excuse ourselves, “We must rise up to get him out of there!” But questions arrive in this world: And who gives that impressive palace such power over us? Why should we obey whoever sits in that armchair, which without our explicit submission is nothing more than a plain, ordinary chair with four legs and an oversized backrest? Why even bother looking for someone else to sit there, if the happiness of our home is fought for with the honest work of our hands, the precise mastery of our emotions and the continuous cultivation of our self-knowledge?

And we obey this thief because, on top of that, he is sheltered under a constitution of laws. But we can also ask: When did we give authority over us to this absurd book that breaks its own rules to spread repression, bureaucracy and corruption?

We cling heavily to this wheel that only stops when it wears out, and that only wears out once it has consumed us to the bone. We sink hopelessly into this crisis that is not only economic or moral, but a crisis of who we are, of dignity and above all of that serene courage.

Having observed all this, the great good news arrives in this world: It’s our fault. At first, this doesn’t sound so good. Our principle of false self-esteem urgently needs to establish that the disaster and humiliation falling upon us is injected into us by those others. It is more comfortable to point, accuse and complain like outraged victims than to accept that there is no one responsible but ourselves. But blaming others is what locks us inside a suffocating shell: Passivity.

Then another piece of good news arrives: Sooner or later, we are going to get tired. And this is undeniably good, because only then will we rebel. And let it be clear, there is no intent to incite anyone to disorder or to senseless war. Our very hunger will see to that, our need to give our life meaning once and for all. One would wish it didn’t happen that way, because no bloody uprising in the history of the human being has ever forged a world of peace. But it is only natural that the later it occurs to us to rise up, the more kitchen knives we will have to stock up on.

And it will be inevitable, because we will want to survive. We will rise up in war because it is the only language we have learned to handle, because we have grown up on blows and absurdities and no one has taught us that it is possible to be happy simply by stripping our attention away from the miseries of the world.

For a while we may put up with a lot standing in lines in the street, at times we may laugh at our own suffering, we may bribe, loot and rob whenever the chance arises, carrying on the chain of abuse, but sooner or later we will reach a limit of impatience and have to stand up and grip our sword in the service of freedom. No one will save us but ourselves. We will be able to follow no one, for we will know that the idea of a messiah is not real, and we will have to put our own skin on the line, risking everything. We will have to see how useless it is to complain, and we will have to leave behind the little we have left to go and protect the honor of our spirit of life.

We will have to go out and defend the integrity of our home, and for that we will have to unite, forget the education we have been indoctrinated with since childhood, and set aside our utopian ideologies and the intolerance they bring with them. We will have to turn to more basic principles, like nourishing our children, respecting our individual right to exist on this fertile earth that knows no borders, and facing the challenging task of loving our fellow beings. We will have to root out, down to zero, the emotional distortions we have grown so greedy for: The cunning, the opportunism, the wickedness, the ambition, the cronyism, the fanaticism, the selfishness, the stupor, the laziness, the shallowness.

It sounds hard, yes. But it is more painful to go on starving, of that we can be sure. There will be fear, the same fear that paralyzes us now, but the very oppression that tries to limit us will push us forward above all else. And not even the most brutal armies of human beings —who, like you and me, let themselves be corrupted— will ever be able to stop us, nor will the most cunning serpent tongues ever sweet-talk us again.

We will reconquer our natural autonomy, not so much by judging the havoc we cause as we express our long-repressed rage, but because, after exploding and after fully digesting our immaturity, we will recognize that we are free beings and that no one will be able to tempt our ears with enough devilry to make us bend our knee so slavishly ever again.

We will grow and learn to tell words from realities, mythomaniacs from masters. We will remember the heartbeat of our mother earth, one and indivisible, and we will never again be separated from her.

Only on that day in this world, when we hear, above the established parameters, the voice of our own reason, will we have gotten back on course, will change have emerged.