[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the obstacles on the way of overturning the ruling paradigm giving only lip service to HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
The gatekeepers-of-the-dying-paradigm made us lose some 50 years of history that could have been fairer, more supportive, more peaceful, happier (Riccardo Petrella)
–It is a matter of searching in the zigzagging of history, to find where we missed the spark that could have ignited and replaced the prevailing paradigm so as to point it in the right direction by calling for the true political struggles that had/have to come. (Federico Fasano).
1. To this end, we citizens must not remain prisoners of the paradigm’s game of trying to save its gatekeepers’ interests –keepers that are trying hard against all odds. As citizen claim holders, we must, at the very least, demand of our elected representatives that negotiations set new foundations (principles and rules) and put in place the appropriate global human rights (HR) institutions to safeguard and defend the rights, the security, the dignity and the well-being of all this planet’s inhabitants. (R. Petrella)
Paraphrasing Daniel Ellsberg (may he R.I.P.): “It is not that we too often areonthe wrong side; we too often are the wrong side”
—There is no such a thing as an expert free of ideology …anywhere. (Miguel Lawner).
2. People who want to believe in crazy things are what we find so much in the world.* S/he who wants to believe sees and feels things that the unbeliever (us?) neither sees nor feels –we would actually reject them. (Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time)
*: So many of these believers end up, not only admitting it, but even desiring what they see and feel as a detestable necessity. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Intellectuals and the ruling paradigm
3. Intellectuals can (and too often do) renounce to denounce what, in their opinion, they consider to be destructive of culture, of values, of rights and of truth, especially when this destruction supposedly occurs in the name of culture, values and truth. (Let us add to this the destruction of democracy with the growth of extreme right-wing political forces and the destruction of peace with the naturalization of war… which they so faintly, if at all, denounce).
4. In the face of all this, perhaps the most incomprehensible silence is that of the intellectuals. Incomprehensible, because they claim, at every step, to have a greater clarity than that of common mortals. Under these conditions, silence is pure complicity.
5. There are many questions that intellectuals have the obligation to answer: Why have they remained silent? Will there still be intellectuals, or what will remain is a decadent and shoddy bunch of cultural icons? (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
We know the truth and we keep silent… Do we oppress others by our silence? (Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog)
—Diverting attention and trying to achieve the truth by just chattering is unbearable.
6. I do complain about my fellow men, about their silence on the decisive issues promoted by the reigning paradigm; I maintain that they know more than they admit knowing –more than they make worthwhile in life**– and this poisons my existence and impels me to seek change. If I express this (in my case, in the Readers?): Can the great chorus of my peers rise as if they had been waiting for a sign? [But why do I reproach the others for their silence? When I also keep silent –sometimes resisting the same questions?].
(F. Kafka).
**: How are my peers’ attempts to live with a clear conscience allow them to go through life and to protect themselves from the dangers that lie in wait for them and for all of us?
7. So many ignore, and those who perhaps know, do not hesitate to lie to themselves. They maintain that they ignore, but they never ignore that they lie. (Mario Benedetti, Ausencias) Is it just that nobody wants to be an exception among the guardians of the paradigm (particularly the most ambitious)? Well, to get to the top, you have to follow the path of the rules, no? Exceptions always stay ‘not too far on the roadside’ though… There remains the possibility that they (the exceptions) may later be rightly recognized by posterity…Is it then too late?. (M. Benedetti, Mas o Menos Hipocritas)
Bottom line
8. In the name of our struggle for democracy, for human rights and for a better future in dignity, we too often continue to refuse to see the true reality with our own eyes; we continue to see with foreign eyes, those of the paradigm (the enemy?), of the masters, copying their models. The take-home thought here is: Since the moment when people’s opinions and wills are molded and manipulated by gigantic machines that escape any control other than that of the ruling classes, entering the electoral game seems to have no sense and no future. (Aram Aharonian)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–Science is progressing at an unstoppable rate, but what is so glorious about it for the dignity of people? —On Being Different: Most people often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious ‘accepted’ target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course, with everybody else aiming there as well, that makes it very hard to hit. (There is also a perennial problem with targets, and that is that they are always still reachable –until they are not). The alternative? Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. Make the niches in which you want to finally reside, with the ideas you truly espouse (note that a niche is not a cage…). The lesson? Stop aiming for the same obvious targets as everyone else. Figure out what makes you different from your peers (the ‘yay-sayers’) and paint your target around it. The ideas you suppress do not make you weird or different from other people. At some point in your life, you were probably shamed for embodying those ideas, so you learned to conceal them. But here is the thing:Contrasting ideas will eventually be noticed if they stand out, because they are different from what surrounds them. If you blend into the background –if you show no idiosyncrasy, no fingerprints, no contrast, no resistance– you become invisible; you become the background. It is only by embracing, rather than erasing your ideas, that you can make changes. (adapted from Ozan Varol) The more you go along with the guardians of the paradigm, the less you are like any of the ‘significant champions of change’ in society…