Society | Culture | War
We Have Learned Nothing
Thoughts on war and society
We spent the last two years living in a situation that we never thought we would live through. That it belonged in the history books and to our ancestors. We were wrong.
Today we wake up to news we never thought we would see again. A war in Europe.
On the other side, we are suspicious of many things.
We are suspicious of what may be behind the escalation of tensions between the two blocks.
Inserted in the middle of the news about the explosions and attacks are the fluctuations in the stock markets and the price of crude oil. Economic sanctions are announced in response to the taking of lives.
And we still have suits sitting in their ivory tower deciding to send representatives of a country, tugging at a senseless patriotic pride, in that no one chose to be born where they were born.
But they only decide because we accept that they decide. Because they shout “go! and some go. Because some accept that, in the middle of 2022, war is still even a possibility to solve anything.
The problem is human, it always has been.
The problem is cultural, it always has been.
The problem is that we hand over to others the responsibility for our own lives, as long as no one enters our house.
The problem is things like this happening every day on the other side of the world and passing us by because it’s none of our business.
But it is with us. It’s always with us and we’re all to blame.
We don’t do enough to inform ourselves about the world around us, to understand its dynamics, and why mistakes have been made throughout history.
We believe everything we read without thinking about where the information comes from.
We lose the ability to filter it, either by excess or by lack of will. By intellectual laziness.
We prefer the behavior of the tribe and we still manage to think in parties, in ideologies, because it costs less.
The parties and ideologies have already been thought up by someone, we can hitch a ride on these ideas and let two or three veins protrude to release half a dozen chemicals that will take us out of the permanent state of stress in which humanity has been immersed for a long time.
The world is sick and we, because we are the world, are the cause of the sickness.
The positive thing about all this is that being the cause also allows us to be the reason for a change. Where to, you ask?
To a world where we remember what is truly human, what unites us more than what separates us.
Because you might say that the economy and market fluctuations and debt and so on are important and that I’m devaluing the way the world works.
But, as Einstein said, if there is a third war, the fourth will be with stones and sticks.
In a country or a world decimated by weapons of mass destruction created by the most harmful species to the planet that has ever walked upon it, none of these concepts that we have invented will do us much good.
Read Saramago’s Blindness and then talk about economics. I don’t think so.
We must return to Humanity.
We have to get out of this noxious cocoon in which we wrap ourselves every day.
To become better people.
More empathetic.
More responsible.
More informed.
More cultured.
Let’s stop putting the responsibility of deciding our lives on others.
When I talk about culture, I am not talking about reading books that nobody reads or being an intellectual.
I am talking about being able to filter information, having a concern for what is coming through our ears, of knowing what is happening, why it is happening.
Of getting out of the existential laziness in which we put ourselves to be attentive to what surrounds us.
Life is a breath and it’s enough to normalize the absurd. Let us start learning.