The incessant flow of information has us on the verge of total scepticism.
The world is in the midst of an underhand struggle, where there is no fire on the front lines and no victims to be seen falling. It is a scenario produced to the bewilderment of the most astute and structured in such a way that identifying the real contenders is an impossible task. Supported by a system of cutting-edge technology whose intricacies we normal beings can never get close to, our physical spaces, our perceptions of reality and our capacity for understanding are invaded in the face of a scenario riddled with conceptual traps. Human relationships have also entered into this perverse game of purposefully fabricated assumptions and fears, making it even more difficult to practice sanity.
Perhaps our dependence on technology and global communications has robbed us of much of our capacity for analysis, that skill that in good universities confronted us with the task of separating – intellectually – the wheat from the chaff. Today we are conditioned to swallow the whole pill of what the most sophisticated centres of power have concocted for the purpose of belief. Just like that. To believe in truths about which we know nothing. To believe in the goodness of the “good guys” and the badness of the “bad guys”, without even getting close to the sources of these certainties, just as Hollywood made us believe in a bipolar world, where good was always on one side.
It is likely that this urge to believe is engraved in our DNA, because of the ease with which we tend to respond to the tricks of discourse. Questioning everything is seen as a sign of rebellion incompatible with social values and good civic behaviour. Obedience is imposed as exemplary conduct from institutions considered “noble”, such as religious and military doctrines, from whose centres submission and war are sanctified. In both, heroism is linked to death. War, then, is transformed into an act bordering on divinity.
This system of ideological imposition into which the hemispheres of the planet have been plunged only produces victims. The domination of communications, with its attendant loss of confidence in the verisimilitude of discourse and journalistic information, has become one of the worst forms of dictatorship. While they tell us the story of freedom and democracy, they take away our freedom to access these supreme values, imposing systems of inequality and subjecting people to regimes lacking opportunities, condemned to sustain the pyramid of power.
The enigma posed for the future of humanity is thus impossible to decipher. When a single man – as is the case with Elon Musk – has the material capacity to offer to end world hunger using his personal fortune, we should be able to analyse that fact with enough sagacity to distinguish its implicit monstrosity and not admire such a hoarding of wealth. Programmed to believe the word of those with the most power and those who reproduce their discourses, we know deep down that this communicational universe is a reflection of the concrete world, with its truths and falsehoods, its advantages and risks. Learning to navigate it is a new and complicated exercise, above all because it is an unavoidable survival resource.
Distinguishing the truth from so much falsehood is an elementary survival resource.
elquintopatio@gmail.com @carvasar
