A friend told me I should write sometimes about USA,and especially after the last months, there's plenty I could comment or rant about...
However, there's too many fronts currently to comment on all in a structured matter in a single post...so I won't really comment on it yet.
Instead, I will rant about something I realised recently and deeply troubled me. It is somewhat related to USA, but I started to think about it regarding Spanish news.
Basically, we humans have a big problem regarding our leaders.
I don't mean that our current leaders are problematic (although that may be true for most), but that our relationship with leaders is rather wrong....
Let me elaborate.
In Spain, as most of you probably know, there has been for some time now a number of organizations and parties that have its origin on demonstrations and protests. Some are older than others, but they are groups that tend to be very democratic, with members voting and encouraging participation. In several cities they created their own party brand, usually using some word that means "together" or "possible" or both. Apart from those there's also Podemos, which is a new party at the state level that defends similar ideas and was created as well from demonstrations. A bit apart but also relevant and much older we have the CUP, a catalan party that defends independence but also very progressive ideas and full democracy (they always vote for any major decisions to take, and simple majority wins). Finally there is also related organizations defending certain rights (like the platform for mortgage victims, or PAH, that tries to stop in any way,including making human barriers, cases where people are forced to abandon the house they live in becasue they cannot pay to the bank).
There's more, but that's a good initial representation of rather democratic organizations.
Anyway,in Spain the traditional parties (who are corrupt as fuck regardless of theoretical ideology) laughed about these new parties and organizations, saying they had little support.
However,after some elections,the traditional parties are no longer laughing. Oh no. They're afraid. Becasue these new ones are gaining a lot of suporters. So what did they do? They attacked their leaders. They started to try and find dirt on them, ridicule them, ask them to be ethical paragons when they themselves are far from it, slandered them, associated them with terrorists, etc.
This shows a way of thinking about what a leader is that matches perfectly with conservative ideals. Conservatives are happier with strong authorities,and strong authorities are achieved when you have one person ruling the others. The Leader. The idol to imitate and compare yourself to it. The untouchable party members that is smart and handsome or pretty and is always right.
The leader decides for you what is good and what is bad, so attacks to the leader are attacks to your whole party.
So,they do the same with these new organizations. And it's stupid. Becasue these new organizations are very democratic. If one of the founders is an hypocrite, the organization just needs to get rid of it,but the ideals and thoughts of the group should not change heavily just becasue one person is gone. And the decisions are voted,so it doesn't matter if some founder fucked up some decision,it's a common thing.
However,now the sad part comes. Attacking the leader kind of worked sometimes. Becasue these progressive parties, even if they defend democracy, also tend to fixate on a leader to guide them. People who support these organizations do not realize either sometimes that it doesn't matter who's leading becasue it's a group effort. So the leader is also always right and handsome or pretty and all that in here too,and the end result is that the discussions are sometimes not which idea is best,but who said what, as if we cannot support good ideas from 2 different possible leaders....
Of course the national media has also always emphasized this,becasue it's a nice way to undermine the same efforts these organizations are making to bring politics to a more accessible area, where everybody participates. I remember some execrable articles from a newspaper considered from the "left" spectrum where they are taking about "schism " in one of those new parties just becasue 2 of the leading people are debating different postures,which will then be voted....
All this was to point to the fact that we delegate too much on leaders to take our decisions for us, to form opinions. We as a species tend to fixate on the person,and not on the idea behind. Therefore, we tend to defend stupid ideas if the right person has mentioned them.
This is a problem, becasue it means we tend to accept the fallacy of Authority, to believe that everything a person says is true just because of the person.
What we should be doing is considering ideas. For sure if we don't uderstand the idea we should delegate to someone with expertise, but we should always be a bit careful about that.
For example, an old male Nobel -price winner in physics taking shit about homosexuals should be shamed and ignored. He may know about physics but he's still an intolerant old man. We do not publish on the newspapers when someone 's grandad does the same,so if he's not taking about his field of physics he should not be considered as any kind of authority on such topics.
On a more subtle way, let's say a political leader that you like has a program with 10 points. You agree on 9 of them and are ambiguous or dislike 1 of them. So,the fact that they may have a bad point does not invalidate the other 9. In the same way, the fact that 9 of these points are good it is not a free pass for the 10th point. Complaining about the 10th point does not attack the first 9,and defending the first 9 does not protect the 10th.
Becasue the important thing is ideas, and that's what we should be supporting and scrutinizing. In politics in particular each one should choose representatives that match your ideology better, but again this is not a free pass for them to do whatever they want,and we should discuss problematic concepts and fight them if we think it's important, no matter how much we agree on other points.
Conservatives sees this as a weakness, and lots of otherwise progressives believe this rethoric.
We should be smarter than that.
We will never have perfect leaders, and we never should consider them to be so. And the faster we get used to this the faster we can act on their bullshit....
