Antonio Navalón
We are in an age where boundaries have disappeared. From the technological advances, the conquests of communication; the profound socio-economic transformations that have occurred over the past thirty years; geostrategic changes; and, as a final result – as the icing on the top of the cake of the new world and if that weren’t enough – Covid-19 emerges. A virus that has managed to paralyze, transform and restructure the world we used to know, which has also allowed us to see and examine what is happening with the political processes. Starting from the fact that, just as dictatorships do not need studies or knowledge in sociology, but what they require is to have experts in intelligence and torture, democracies live – or at least lived – of having permanent knowledge and social auscultation.
Since the explosion of social networks and since they became the main communication system throughout the planet, the interaction between individuals and even between nations has changed completely. This phenomenon has managed to intrude even among the Taliban themselves in Afghanistan, who have gone from the practice of cutting off the hand of anyone who watched television through the use of a satellite dish to having Twitter as their main means of communication. The penetration of social networks in the global structure has been so deep that even a group as closed as the Taliban has made them its main speaker and means of dissemination. They have caused a change of such magnitude that, above all, it leads us to wonder if their use – or misuse – is the main reason that in countries where there are democratic processes, political action can be carried out without any limit. If the only limits that exist in politics today have nothing to do with the programs, with the proposals, nor is it necessary to have coherence or have certain public exemplarity, then effectively, the limits of politics are where they are at the moment, that is to say, nowhere.
It is not a problem or a question only Mexican, Spanish, American, or French; it is a global problem that lies where the vote is still used. The absence of limits; the need not to pay for the mistakes or the lies that one tells; and the abolition of the term of falsehood or lies as a political evil are forging sick societies. Societies that, deep down, all they do is fall off a cliff of extremes where, without realizing, one day all the excessive use of words – that experience without limits and that lack of need to be careful about what we do – can make us find ourselves in a situation far from desirable. A panorama in which – to our bad luck – words become acts and in which they lead us to positions of unprecedented social confrontation.
Today, we have changed the processes of reflection. We have gone from having such curious beliefs as the fact that having the heart on the left side and the wallet on the right was the reason why on many occasions, the right-wing regimes triumphed until they had governed the majority of the democratic world in the last fifty years in the search for the center.
One of the biggest curiosities of this era is that you can be a hypocrite, a liar, or a manipulator. Yet, you can come to power with the proper and efficient use of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any social networks, orchestrating the purest of social scams. Today, it’s possible to propose, promise, say, and do practically anything without worrying that those who vote will not demand accountability at the polls but will do everything through social media.
It gives the impression that social networks are fostering a situation in which the memory of government actions and the democratic quality increasingly resembles that of fish and less of that of human beings. Social networks are changing and shaping social memory and resembling that of fish, in the sense that these networks – which control everything in our life – have also managed to limit our great cognitive capacity to simple short-term memories.
In this world that changes day by day, one of the things that worries me the most is the lack of ambition to transcend. Otto Von Bismarck said that while “the politician thinks about the next election, the statesman thinks about the next generation.” However, at this time, we live in a situation in which not even the next elections represent a time frame that configures or motivates political action. At present, the irresponsibility in the face of what is done and said is of such magnitude that practically everything can be done, and everything can be said without, apparently, suffering from the consequences. In this sense, it does not surprise me that we are consuming democratic times without being able to organize alternatives in the face of governments that we do not like or do not meet our expectations.
What happened in Afghanistan and the internal debates of the Democrats place the Party represented by a donkey with no margin for error. If they continue on this path and if they do not find greater coherence in the way of how to convey what they are doing and why they are doing it, in November 2022, Joe Biden could find himself facing an irreversible situation. A situation that would mean the end of the Democratic majority in Congress and in which Republicans would regain the power of the US legislative branch, but this would also be the ideal platform to see the return to the Oval Office in 2024 Donald Trump. And all this in the background is made and orchestrated – like almost everything in modern politics today – on the fact of not having limits, of not having an efficient system of accountability, but, above all, by the reality that no one has memory and that we are in the midst of the government of the fish.
In the Mexican case, the importance of the qualifications and disqualifications issued by the presidency is extraordinary. Same that is only comparable with the inability of the opposition to create a viable alternative that can be reflected – regardless of the eternal dialectical debates in politics – in concrete proposals that can allow a change in situations. And while all this is happening, the big issues – the future of education, the economy, social integration, in short, the future – are being pushed into the corner, not in the present but the second or the immediate tweet.
I would not like to blame the communication tools we have today for what is happening. Since, for me, social networks are not blessed, but, nevertheless, I prefer to stay in my position of never fighting with reality. But what I do blame is the use we humans make of them and the opportunity that – if used well – social networks could represent. However, what is important to reflect on at this time is why we do not use all that strength and dedication that we invest in this new means of communication to create a giant snowball that ends up crushing what irresponsibility means, the ability to not tell the truth – not by chance – and, above all, our inability to protest and claim, regardless of what is done.
In any case, to avoid having a situation in which at the end the government of the fish – either due to lack of memory, of remembrances and therefore of claims – becomes how we can define this situation, in which we are installing day by day through the impulse and momentary communication of social networks. To avoid this, I propose that once again, we recover the reasons and motives why we have politicians leading our countries. We pay them to rule and lead. We must demand that they deliver the solutions they promised in their campaigns. We must make them see everything happening, turning the truth into a non-toxic or ideal utopian factor, as a tool to carry out justice, and where human goodness prevails. A system must be re-established that, above all, allows to reinstate the level of popular exigence based on the politicians fulfilling what they said they would do and being accountable for it.
In short, the national agenda must be built by a sense not only of transcendence but of continuity. However, as long as personal interests prevail, the desire to confront, but, above all, that political action is a permanent settling of accounts, making the attack will always be a sigh of hope.
Mahatma Gandhi used to say: “An eye for an eye and the world will end up blind.” Is the world already blind? Or, could it be that we have become so blind as not to realize that the absence of requirements allows more and more atrocities to be carried out on our behalf every day? Because if this is true – something that is more difficult to refute every day – we are leaving in the hands of a few not only our life or future, but we are allowing and witnessing how the continuous destruction of the present is perpetuated along with the future of our children.
Politicians do not come from Mars. Politicians are our brothers, parents, children, acquaintances, or friends. We are the politicians. That said, we have to impose the clamor on ourselves. Politicians do what we allow them to do and go as far as we allow it. However, I think they have already gone too far. And they have succeeded, in the first place, because we have allowed it. But, above all, because before there was the social outbreak or – as President López Obrador called it – before there was a situation in which the tiger came out of its cage. Well, oh, surprise! The tiger is on the loose, is free, and it does not have a cage; it simply has a certain number of characters and bites into concepts that do not have – basically – any social repercussion. And in this government of the fish, that tiger does everything and damages everything from the blessed – or cursed – social networks.
