About the “people”, understood as a perception and a utopia that is invoked again and again to dialogue about society and its collective expressions, the “people” as subject and protagonist of the story, let’s say, there is in political rhetoric usually occur two opposite and equally stupid and misleading approaches when it comes to understanding why what happens happens when power and its mysteries are pimped.
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One of these approaches is what might be called “demolition”: the flirtatious and flattering, pathetic exaltation of the people as the embodiment of all virtues and all titles. It is the idea that people are never wrong and are superior to their leaders: incorruptible and virginal, naive, hardworking, good, exemplary people. Demagogues – that’s demagogy – are experts at puffing up this world of Chinese paper by tapping on the lid of a pot.
The other approach is no less inaccurate: it is clearly “misodemic” and consists of hating people and attributing all evils and shortcomings to them with the same force as the unfounded and flattering praises of demagogues and false messiahs. . The news that people are inherently rude, incompetent, uneducated (you would have been if people were from civilization), illiterate, inferior, ignorant, lacking in imagination, decent courage, clarity.
What’s odd is that both schools, both approaches, demolition and misodemic, to give them a ridiculously pompous name, are generally part of the same process of distortion and disenchantment. For it is not that the one who professes them always remains there, in the same place. no And many begin with demagogic flattery when it suits them, or so they think, to finish shamelessly with the sickening rejection of the useless and the stupid.
First comes the increase of the people, the siege, the so-called and grotesque seduction; then, when the results are not those expected, comes the logic of reproaching him for not understanding.
Stitch sees the countryside: first comes the rise of the people, the siege, the presumptive and grotesque seduction; then, when the results are not as expected, which almost never happens, comes the logic of blaming him for not understanding, for being corrupt and pathetic, for deserving his fate. The problem is never the pettiness and pettiness of the rulers, their vanity. no. The problem is that the masses don’t know or realize what’s best for them: fuck it.
There are masses who believe, poor bastards, that they bow to education and books, as if Fascist Germany wasn’t the most sophisticated and cultured country in Europe when Hitler arrived. in power. It is the same deduction of those who repeat this perverted and false sentence of Unamuno, who I also believe never said: “Fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by travelling”. .
Because the city, whatever it is, is in intention a kind of indecipherable and imperfect monster: a monster with many heads, a wounded and cornered beast. But it is also the very concrete sum of interests and opportunities that escape normal exploration and understanding, both by those who idealize them and by those who censor and despise them. The people are a force in history, always going beyond their own channels, and no one can stop them.
And there is everything: intelligence and cunning, venality, corruption, survival instinct, dignity, pettiness, jet set, pettiness, supremacy, cowardice. It has been and will be all its life, so there is no point in getting excited or disgusted with the city as if it were inconcrete and immutable in sharing the powerful and elusive flow that it is. Should we then have a better dialogue with society? Maybe I have no idea.
Let’s at least talk about what everyone does and the responsibilities they have, yes, because the city is also a sum of individuals.
And blaming others doesn’t ultimately stop anyone from being who they are.
JUAN ESTEBAN CONSTAÍN www.juanestebanconstain.com
(Read here all the chronicles of Juan Esteban Constaín in EL TIEMPO)