May 19, 2024, 7:00 AM
May 19, 2024, 7:00 AM
Jorge Richter Ramirez*
How did we get here if what was underway was a transformative process, a construction of a better society, of tolerance and acceptance of otherness that had been resisted for decades and decades. How suddenly we are faced with this excessive consumerism of language that has imposed on us its perverse and pernicious logic of political emptying. And how the revolutionaries who built the Plurinational State today have been reduced to simple aggressive talk, hysteria, shouting, fake news and parallel and fictional realities.
This political emptying is at times imperceptible because it is presented as freedom of expression and today also as freedom of the press. Political emptying is, in short, the suppression of ideas in exchange for the imposition of easy violence, hate being its greatest argumentative factor.
The strident decibels of language consumerism are now also incorporating a different objective: the creation of new ways of silencing thought, ideas, dissidence and reflective exposition regarding the State, society and political power.
It is the attempt to exterminate intellectual discrepancies, free thought, public and disruptive voice, innovative democratic views or the expansion itself, and at times uncomfortable, of the system of representation, institutions and democratic organization.
Hate seeks to destroy everyone who competes with you. Hatred determines the plural or singular list of who has the supreme authorization to participate and who must be resigned to secondary or simple support roles.
The silencing worked from right-wing and ultra action is that which defames you, that which is deafened by criticism, that which sows shame and pushes you to regret having publicly exposed your thoughts, that which seeks to make you invisible and despise what you have spoken.
Silence is their goal, a self-imposed gag out of shame or harassment.
The forms of what is understood as how politics should be done in Bolivia, transversal to all political and party structures, have incorporated what is called symbolic violence, which in turn is intertwined with physical violence. Theodor Adorno said that all suffering is physical.
About this, Marcia Tiburi writes clearly: “At the base of the institutions in which authoritarianism (State, Justice, School, Family, Church) defines the course of acts of oppression and submission of people in general, violence Symbolism tells us about the understanding of violence itself: the idea that violence defines possible violence. Hence, some feel authorized, either to insult or to promote hatred on television or on social networks.”
The malignancy of words in public statements, in the virtuality of infinity made possible by social networks, is the format that symbolic violence, easy violence, takes today. There, gesticulating a character that becomes uncontrollable, with the comedy of shameless histrionics they promote hatred daily.
The Assembly members of Creo shout uncontrollably in the Departmental Legislative Assembly of Santa Cruz, the irreproducible adjectives build contempt and hatred. There is no debate or thought, but irresponsible aggressiveness.
The MAS deputy, known for his cadres who prosecute those who dislike his choice of hatred and defamation, regularly appears before the country to unleash fire from a mouth that does not even babble an idea, but does harbor an enormous ability for insult and hatred.
The CC deputy, the CC deputy, enemies of each other, one and the other, a former president who hates daily and several times a day, another former president who does the same, a permanent candidate, all without pause competing with the other group of hate platformers on who hates more. Every day, lacking all compassion for society, they proceed to discursive lynching. These “opinion makers” take over families, break into the private part of life and proceed to decompose and degrade politics, the value of democracy, peaceful social coexistence, dignities to disperse scandals.
Once democracy was recovered in 2020, symbolic and physical violence was installed as a method of doing politics in the greatest expression of the radical right in the country, then represented by the violent project of the elected governor of Santa Cruz and the Civic Committee of that time.
Drowned in its rabid bustle, evicted by those who thought of it as a possible alternative and without having bequeathed some ideas that could build a State and a viable society, its remembered distinctive is violence, considered audacity at first, but which could only drag towards the inevitable destiny: the exacerbation of hatred and confrontation between Bolivians.
With what his advisors called camachismo turned off, the post of effective symbolic and physical violence has been occupied by those who one day built inclusion and new rights to live well. Irrepressible in his blunders, he reveals falsified information Sunday after Sunday.
It is slander and imposture to be someone who has not been for a long time. Just destroy and hate. He hates to exist, to be and to be. He instructs his anonymous ones to hate militantly, he raises armies of haters. It contaminates everything with contempt and offenses. It is not ideology, nor thought, it is the supremacy of hate over ideas. Hatred of those who don’t want to be like him.
The destruction of society occurs when people’s subjectivity is being overwhelmed. There is no possible future of peace and well-being if words of good are replaced by an action of fascism masked by the people.
Jorge Richter Ramírez is a Political Scientist
