The Notebook. José Saramago
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to say it is, government of the people by the people for the people, any debate on the question of power would lose a lot of its meaning, since if power resides in the people it is the people who control it, and people controlling the power clearly would only do so for their own good and to secure their own happiness, compelled by what I call, with no pretension to conceptual rigor, the law of the preservation of life. Well, only a perverse spirit, Panglossian even to the point of cynicism, could dare to proclaim the happiness of a world that, on the contrary, nobody should expect us to accept as it is, just by virtue of its being, supposedly, the best of all possible worlds. This is the right and actual situation of the so-called democratic world, where if it is true that the people are governed, it is also true that they are not governed by or for themselves. It’s not a democracy that we live in, but a plutocracy, which has ceased to be local and close but has become instead at once universal and inaccessible.
Democratic power must by definition always be provisional and circumstantial; it depends on the stability of the vote, on the fluctuation of class interests or ideologies, and therefore can be understood as an organic barometer that registers variations in a society’s political will. But in the past, just as today—albeit to an increasingly great degree today—there have been numerous cases of apparently radical political changes that have resulted in radical changes in government but that were not followed by the radical economic, cultural, or social changes that the results of the vote had promised. Today, calling a government socialist, social democratic, conservative, or liberal is to ascribe power to it, that is, purport to identify something in it that is not really there but in some other place far out of reach—a place where you can see the filigree outlines of economic and financial power, a power that invariably eludes us when we try to get closer, that inevitably counterattacks if we whimsically wish to reduce or regulate its domain, subordinating it to the common good. In other, clearer words, then, what I’m saying is that people do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control. And if I talk about the market in this way it is only because today, and more with each day that passes, it is this that is the instrument par excellence of authentic, unitary, simple power, global economic and financial power, which is not democratic because the people never elected it, which is not democratic because the people do not govern it, and finally which is not democratic because it does not have the people’s happiness as its aim.
Our forefathers in their caves would say, “It is water.” We, being a little wiser, warn, “Yes, but it is contaminated.”
September 30: Hopes and Utopias
A lot has been written and much more chattered about the virtues of hope. Utopias have always been and always will be Paradise as dreamed of by skeptics. Yet not only skeptics but also fervent believers, the Mass and Communion kind of believers who look forward to Heaven, still ask the compassionate hand of God to shade their heads, protect them from rain and heat, and deliver in this life at least a small portion of the rewards that he has promised in the next. Which is why anyone who isn’t satisfied with what has fallen to his lot in the unequal distribution of the planet’s assets, especially the material assets, clings to the hope that it won’t always be the devil who is at the door and that one day—sooner rather than later—it will be wealth that comes in through the window. Someone who has lost everything, but has been lucky enough to retain at least his sad life, considers that he is owed the most human right of hoping that tomorrow will not be as wretched as today. Presuming, of course, that there is justice in the world. Well, if in this place and in these times there did exist something worthy of the name justice, not the mirage of a tradition able to deceive our eyes and our mind but a reality that we could touch with our hands, it is obvious that we wouldn’t have to carry hope around with us every day, cradling it to us, or be carried around cradled by it. Simple justice (not that of courtrooms, but the justice of that fundamental respect that should preside over relations between human beings) would take charge of putting things in their proper places. In the past, the poor man asking alms would be denied with the hypocritical words “Have patience.” I don’t think advising someone to have hope is all that different from advising him to have patience. It is common to hear recently elected politicians say that impatience is antirevolutionary. Perhaps so, but I incline toward the view that, on the contrary, many revolutions have been lost through an excess of patience. I have nothing against hope, obviously, but I prefer impatience. It’s time for impatience to make itself felt in the world, to teach a thing or two to those who would prefer us to feed on hopes. Or on dreams of utopia.
October 2008
October 1: Where Is the Left?
Three or four years ago, in an interview with a South American newspaper, from Argentina, I think, I came out with a statement I subsequently thought would provoke discomfort, discussion, even a scandal (such was my naïveté), beginning with local left-wing groups and continuing, who knows, like a wave growing in concentric circles, out into the international media—at least such political, trade union or cultural organs of the media that are the tributaries of the said left. The paper reproduced my argument word for word, in all its harshness, not shying away from actual obscenities, as in the following: “The left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in.”
The left responded to my deliberate challenge with the iciest of silences. No communist party, for instance, beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I had said or simply to argue about the propriety or the lack of propriety of my language. Even more to the point, nor did any of the socialist parties then in government in their respective countries—I’m thinking especially of those in Portugal and Spain—consider it necessary to demand a clarification from the impudent writer who had dared to throw a stone into a fetid swamp of indifference. Nothing of anything at all, absolute silence, as if there were nothing but dust and spiders in the ideological tombs where they had taken refuge, or nothing more than an ancient bone that was no longer solid enough for a relic. For several days I felt as excluded from human society as if I were carrying the plague, or were the victim of a kind of cirrhosis of the mind, no longer able to speak coherently. I even ended up thinking that the compassionate line going the rounds among those people who were keeping so quiet was something like, “Poor thing, what can you expect at his age?” It was clear that they didn’t think my opinions worthy of their consideration.
Time went on, and on, the state of the world grew increasingly complicated, and the left continued fearlessly to play out the roles, whether in power or in opposition, that had been handed to them. I, who had in the meantime made another discovery, that Marx was never so right as he is today, imagined, when the cancerous mortgage scam broke in the United States a year ago, that the left, wherever it was, if it was still alive, would finally open its mouth to say what it thought of the matter. I already have an explanation: the left doesn’t think. It doesn’t act, it doesn’t risk taking a step. What happened then has gone on happening, right up to today, and the left has continued in its cowardly fashion not thinking, not acting, not risking taking a step. Which is why the insolent question in my title should not cause surprise: “Where is the Left?” I am not suggesting any answers; I have already paid too dearly for my illusions.
October 2: Enemies at Home
That there is a crisis in the family is something nobody would dare to deny, however much the Catholic Church might seek to disguise the disaster with a mellifluous rhetoric that doesn’t even deceive itself. Nor can we deny that many so-called traditional values of family and social cohabitation have gone down the drain, dragging with them even those values that ought to be defended from the constant attacks coming from the highly conflictive society in which we live; nor that today’s schools—the successors to those old schools that for many generations were tacitly charged (in the absence of anything better) with making up for the