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Editor's Note: Felipe Ribadeneira has a Ph.D in philosophy, specializing in Kant, Heidegger and political philosophy. He is a member of the advisory board of the Graduate School of Political Management of George Washington University. He was editorialist for Diario Hoy, from Quito, Ecuador. His articles have been published in blogs and magazines.
(CNN Spanish) - Chavez's first presidency began in 1999. The material conditions of the previous 20 years largely explain his electoral victory. Inflation had been very high (more than 30% per year on average), anemic growth, and the repression of the Caracazo in 1989 had left very deep marks. As the Chavista era has proved even more devastating - the data is well known - it is surprising that Chavismo, and not only Maduro, still stands. But it must be remembered that this regime is not democratic but tyrannical and that lasts thanks to drug trafficking, Stalinist political control - the specialty of Cubans who have invaded Venezuela - and the external support it receives thanks to the new cold war. As long as those factors do not disappear, especially the second one, Venezuela is not likely to be released. But here the material explanations and speculations about a future that never comes are not interested, but one of the persistent ideas of the Ibero-American socio-political imaginary that inspired Chávez and that explains, in part, the disaster.
Chávez correctly pointed out that the democratic system - puntofijismo - that had begun in 1958 after the previous military dictatorship, that of Pérez Jiménez, was delegitimized. How did Chávez try to legitimize this new military dictatorship? With a narrative, which begins with Bolívar, now called ridiculously - and that is how Bolivarians are, ridiculous - the eternal father. If American independence and constitutionalism appeal to the eternal truth of natural law, Chavez appeals to the eternal father. Why Bolivar? Because he is the Liberator, and in this narrative what is at stake is freedom. Chávez had an undemocratic idea of freedom, but here the content is not so interesting but the form of the story. In the epic imagined by Chávez, Bolívar is the father. We are all children of Bolívar, as well as all the children of Venezuela, even those of their toughest adversaries are children of Chávez, according to the adoption by force that he himself declared in his first speech before Congress. Does not this idea of the mythical father last in Latin America? Where does this persistent paternalism come from? Is this good heroic father, who dominates the background of the Latin American social and political imagination, an avatar of the eternal father in heaven? Kant defined the Enlightenment as the exit of the minority man of which he himself is guilty. The Enlightenment would reach certain false Latin American elites, but it has never had widespread validity, nor does it now. Let's glimpse a disturbing truth: Latin America is full of children's minds.
Chavez, delirious and reckless (who can stand listening to his recordings), became convinced that those were epic days and that through his person passed the emancipatory and redeeming spirit that became a reality in Venezuela and that he would no longer be betrayed again. Chavez believed the spirit of the world on horseback, which is what Hegel said when he saw Napoleon pass. I prefer death rather than betrayal, he said; until victory always, he and the other Bolivarians repeated. By themselves those proclamations so violent (those cries of war, sooner or later, end in the death ... of opponents), and intellectually so excessive, dishonest and irresponsible, demonstrate their authoritarian and undemocratic conviction. But the heroes fight to the end, and obviously Chavez believed himself a hero. If Bolívar was the original great hero, Chavez was the mini hero of this story whose form is known. It is not difficult to detect in his speeches the narrative structure of the story told in the Judeo-Christian way: providential purposes, messianic and radical ruptures, apocalypse, and millenarianism.
After the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, this progressive and redemptive narrative has begun to lose credibility in Europe, and various currents of thought have already signaled its confusion. It may well be that the story does not have an ultimate end, to begin with because the concept of the end is native to the work and its production, and we do not know if its transposition of history is valid. It also turns out that a certain absolutist way of conceiving the end, promised by faith and desired by reason, is impossible. There are morally better worlds than others - one in which human rights are not run over is better than one in which it is. There can be a variety of possible morally better worlds. But what cannot be is an absolutely moral world. And not because it presupposes human perfectibility beyond what is likely; the wood we are made of could be too crooked for so much wonder. The reason is that in such a world, in which everyone acted morally, there could be no external sanctions (the sanction would be immoral) and therefore there would be no laws, norms, or institutions external to the individual (or if any, they would coincide with the internal ones, which is as if there were none). But if it were not possible to act immorally, or pass moral judgments - to maintain that this norm, law, principle, practice, etc. it is immoral - nor to act morally regardless of the social or legal sanctions that might apply, wouldn't morality itself disappear? Paradoxically, the absolutely moral world is not moral, but is beyond good and evil. Not only that, in that world, there is also no justice (or injustice), because without rules there can be none. It turns out that the absolutely moral world is contradictory and unimaginable.
What does all this have to do, so abstract and absurd, with Chávez and Latin America? That Chávez's political action was determined by absolutist enthusiasm and magical "thought", which he thinks he imagines a final redemption that is rationally impossible. And if what it was about was to moralize the world and create a fair socio-political system in which the innocent did not suffer more, what they created is a system of absolute injustice, not only because of the material differences between those who have dollars and those who do not, but above all because tyranny is the very definition of injustice, since there the law does not govern but the will of the tyrant. The irony of politically absolutist impulses is that they tend to create the opposite of what they propose. What neither theology (why does God allow the innocent to suffer?) Or philosophy (why is it better to suffer than to commit injustices? ... and it is) have been able to solve, a tyrant delirious of notions would not solve vague
This is a delusion that in Latin America has more validity than one might think, and prestige also. A delirium that with the Bolivarians returned in a particularly powerful way. As skillful as the tyrant Castro was, it was impossible for him to manage the Venezuelan oil bonanza - with catastrophic results for Venezuela and the continent - without the redemptive idea being effective. Although the Cuban revolution becomes increasingly gray, for many it retains its greenery; devotees refuse to see reality, and only bet on the promise. In the background of the Ibero-American conscience, when not in the foreground of the imagination, the redemptive narration of Christianity and Marxism survives, whose similarity on this point is well known. There are the antipolitics, the insufficient reflection on the State, the supposedly privileged awareness of the "low" estates, the irrational commitment to impossible historical turns, the presumption that history has an end, and the empty, contradictory, and unimaginable end that They think conceive.
This criticism does not defend the status quo in Latin America or anywhere else, and on the contrary it increasingly gives the impression that anarchic authoritarianism (it is the contradiction that Latin America politically describes when it does not escape dictatorial authoritarianism) or capitalist liberal democracy need desperately find an ethical-political concept of justice capable of reorienting them. Where is the collective good? Can there be only one when there is as now multiplicity of cultures, lifestyles, ethics, etc.? Are the economic laws, whose violation has led to suffocation when not the total collapse of the Bolivarian economies, "natural" and independent of a certain ethical-political order?
Finally, this criticism may allow the correction of two generalized but erroneous opinions caused by the brightness of the crime and criminality of these regimes. First, that greed sufficiently explains these regimes. The second, that the intention of the Bolivarian political action was from the perverse beginning. It is obvious that during their long dictatorships the Bolivarian became thieves, liars, abusive, and ill-intentioned, but that is another interesting question. Some of them will have some obscure glimpse of what they once were and what they ended up being. However, we can assume that his initial action was directed at an absolutist good and too confusingly thought, but well at last. Philosophy has been a bad influence, making us believe that the perfect ethical-political worlds can be real, and that it is possible to realize them without counting on the material and ethical-political situation of the present. But just as philosophy has been a bad influence, it can also be good if it is self-critical. Maybe then we avoid the comic spectacle of Latin American "intellectuals" sitting in the ministries of a tyrant furiously designing what they called, without having read Aristotle, the good life.