PHOTO: Orlando Hernández, photojournalist of Telenoticias (Telemundo)
Socialist revolutions do not take place in times of misery and poverty as one would expect them to, but during prosperity and progress. To know this, we need only look back at history, which reminds us that the Essene movements (primitive socialism) coincided with the height of the Empire pax augusta.
Not to say that the theses of Marx and Engels took shape in the shelter of the steam engine. The French Revolution was three quarters of the same. It exploded at the moment when the French peasantry was experiencing the highest level of welfare in its history. This thesis is also true in America. Just listen to Castro's Cuba and Chavez's Venezuela. Both exploded in the best economic moment of each, the Island, during the Batista cycle, the latter during the boom of the nineties. However, no socialist revolution has taken root in poor Africa where poverty and misery are rampant. It would seem that socialism disappears when misery is rife, is it because it is itself misery? There are three reasons that I give here to explain why, when people begin to live better, they self-sabotage themselves by embracing socialism.
And they are: fear, envy and anguish. The fear of losing what has been earned, a feeling that is in vogue with prosperity. No one is afraid of losing what he does not have. Envy spreads when the gains of one is opposed to the gains of others doing so to a greater or faster extent. Where there is no gain there is no envy. The same applies to anguish, a feeling that is put to the test when what has been gained is liable to be lost at any moment or to be doubled, when the time comes. Nor is anguish expected where there is nothing to lose. In order to alleviate the heaviness of the fear of anguish and envy, many happily embrace an authority that puts order, that controls, that reduces the outbursts that wealth arouses in the human soul. They follow the totalitarian remedy of cutting through the pain and faced with a headache, they end up with their heads to put an end to the pain.
So, they seek to deal with the pains of prosperity, that, instead of going to the root of the matter, they cut the stem of prosperity itself. To cling to this attitude is to assume a price so destructive that only someone out of his senses would take it for granted. In view of the present, what a madman the world is swarming with! Let me conclude this article by exhorting you that there are few if any times that socialism has satisfied, even for a moment, the desires of those who cling to wantonness as a way of life.
Where there is no price, you yourself become the price. Don't forget that! And if you are not in a position to realize this reality, then it is because you have taken for granted to give up your will for a plate of lentils. Remember that nothing is more expensive than what is free, for what is free cannot be returned with money, and to be left in peace, it can only be returned with a favor as great as the first: your freedom. I repeat it to you and thus I am satisfied with the characters requested by the publisher to end this text, and by the way I refresh your head in the order of priorities: freedom, then freedom, and finally freedom. Do you get it?
This article was originally published in Spanish in La República.
