The president we elect this year will need that. What is humility? In Latin it meant “to strengthen”, but here I use it in the first of the meanings given to it by the Royal Academy: “knowledge of one’s own limitations and weaknesses and acting in accordance with that knowledge”. It also registers meanings of baseness, submissiveness and performance that correspond more to the variant “humiliation”, an act of denigration. Ecuadorians, with a crisis of identity and self-esteem that we have always had, practice a little the virtue of humility, but we are given to humiliate ourselves, to lower ourselves, to drag ourselves, it is enough to remember the sad episode from “submissive” and how poor that authoritarian of ours looked before Emperor Xi who imposed harsh conditions on him. This obvious weakness has as a forced counterpart the fact that you do not know who I am will remove-di’ái, of thick poles, every Ecuadorian has his own excuse to let the smoke easily rise to the top of his brain and forget his insignificance. We do not admit that here only a handful of athletes have world-class success and no one knows who we are.

Pride is equated with power, a blinding passion that clouds intelligence and senses. It is certainly an evolutionary feature by which nature prevents the endless dominance of individuals and strains, in order to open up the possibility of improvement through selection. It is true that as power accumulates, insight and common sense disappear in equal proportion. Intelligence in itself is not a vaccine against this scourge, because being power in itself, it has a narcissistic counterbalance that limits it. This is not a theoretical exercise, we have seen it many times with the last Ecuadorian presidents, most of their mistakes come from their arrogance. Hence his inability to structure effective teams outside his inner circle. Their deafness before the voices that warned them about crazy measures is of the same origin. And it also causes blindness to the core of the country’s problems, by being distracted by demagogic measures and populist demonstrations that feed the black hole of their ego.

Someone suggested that when applying, the candidates should present a list of ministers who will accompany them in the first months. Nothing would give such a clear idea of ​​the kind of country the applicant is trying to build, but we would also know whether he is someone who wants to open himself up to the best managers or who lives enmeshed in a cabal of courtiers. Since this is not possible, let’s take a look during the election process at who proved to be the most open to suggestions and whose team was not made up of sycophants. It is possible to glimpse these characteristics, but the truth is that an accurate diagnosis is difficult. So, one can only hope that the deities will bestow the new president with a tonal gift of humility, so that he will recognize his weaknesses and mistakes, and try to correct them. Humility is not an academic skill, but an ethical attitude, the heritage of the wise. (OR)