The political in the internal and the external

The Political in the External and Internal

My first conscious memory of deciding to study Political Science was the call to understand the structures that made the world function. From this knowledge, I wanted to think about possibilities for transforming reality, gaining a clearer vision of how power and institutions work.

This decision made me realize that while academia is a very powerful legitimizing umbrella, it often lacks the knowledge, practice, commitment, and above all, the power to generate any of these. Some discourses are reproduced, others are censored; Eurocentrism, elitism, and the endogenous practices of the institution pervert what could be a tool for positive change for our communities. But doesn’t this happen in all areas?

We live in a reality where no one is aware of how the rules of the game are, of what we, ourselves as an animal species, have created. We have created political and economic systems that we neither understand nor can improve in their terrible performance, with the detriment of the environment, creation of inequality, poverty, crime. Is universal access to health, education, and a healthy environment a possibility for us humans, who have achieved so much development and technological advancement? It seems we are talking about utopia or idealism when we try to think real and empirically about such assumptions of a dignified life and peaceful existence.

In our globalized, patriarchal, capitalist, Western world, everything we build seems to have “unfolded” in ways that poison, confuse, and exploit us. Food production and consumption, global financial speculation coupled with extreme labor precariousness, marketing and advertising bombardment alongside celebrity culture, existential emptiness and the pharmaceutical industry, fanatical and organized crime, anonymous wealth concentrated in owners of the worlds, marginalized people in situations of structural poverty, how can everything function so perfectly wrong?

I think my main concern about understanding the world I live in led me to perceive that the intention of wanting to know how the system works and what possibilities we have to improve it, far from being an academic-technical issue, is a disruptive, radical, and even dangerous position, since knowledge, awareness, and consciousness are intentionally kept out of reach of ordinary people. Information seems to have become one of the most powerful tools, not only because it’s inaccessible to understand how the informatic system works, and whoever knows and understands has an advantage over everyone else, but because any movement of any piece on the board is recorded and available to whoever can buy it. They call it Big Data. Inequality in terms of knowledge disables people from acting rationally, as orthodox economists “assume,” lack of information generates positions of power that are practically untouchable. Information, the concentration of wealth, what else are corporations, the beneficiaries who sustain and defend the structure of the reality we inhabit, taking over? Yes, our magic, our consciousness, and our ethics. It’s “unserious” to think in those terms, and I am grateful to contemporary movements that collectively announce: it’s the unserious thing that they think we will continue to believe their lies.

Primarily, from feminism, the structural paradigm shift saves us from the construction of the strong, conquering, heterosexual, white man, but in many of its branches, it also saves us from positivist, rationalist, technocratic thought. Not necessarily from a counterpoint that presents itself as pure and improved, but from the criticism, questioning, and deconstruction of the values, behaviors, and patterns that perpetuate and reproduce the system that destroys us today: that of capitalist calculability.

In contact with movements on the reflection of environmental care, the agroecological production of food, the conditions of abuse of living beings in products derived from animals, the vindication of ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples, feminism not only questions the symbolic bases of the patriarchal, extractivist, speculative, and abusive system, but allows us to generate collective platforms for knowledge construction, information that is massified thanks to the movement.

This made me recognize that a much more powerful and intimate knowledge than that of the functioning of institutions and the economy has been censored: that of our consciousness. Not only are we unaware of the functioning of the external world, we are unaware of the functioning of our internal world: our spirituality, our magical creative power is reduced to stories of shamans in the Sierras de Córdoba and “believe it or burst”. With feminism, we not only become aware of how badly the external world functions, but also of the need for each person to be willing to deconstruct themselves internally and to act from the ethical commitment to do so harmoniously and responsibly with the environment, something that hardly exists anymore in our daily lives.

Our work then is to ask, question, criticize, but above all, to reconnect with the loving depth, the fearful darkness of the unconscious, the ethical commitment to a better world. Encouraging ourselves to ask everything that is not legitimate to ask from scientific, enlightenment rationalism, knowing that this paradigm can qualify us as idealists and superstitious, but no longer allowing it to define us. From altruism and not from selfishness, from the communal and not from the individual, from the loving and not from the speculative. No matter how lost we feel the battle is, it is not justified to look the other way, to sweep under the rug, to turn feelings and sorrows into statistics, beings of the most powerful tools alive in resources. Power lies in the awareness of the corruption of the environment and of every small action that can improve it.