Although I am concerned about government and, by the way, about the state, I have always been concerned about the harmful effects that politics – the great predator – has on civil society, on ordinary people.

One of these effects is simplification, reducing life to an election project and ideological vision, to proclamation and discourse.

On the face of it, it is an academic topic, one might even say unpleasantly intellectual, but, believe it or not, it has huge consequences in everyday life and should be of general interest, because thinking about such a topic contributes to understanding who we are., and interpret masks and the veils that are part of our culture, the rhetoric that is part of common speech, the concealment and euphemism that explains the hypocrisy, the submissiveness that is hidden in the assumed loyalty, the fear of freedom that is articulated in very popular ideologies, which in turn are the dogmas of faith that “heal” people from the responsibility of thinking.

Society is a complex network of relationships, myths, beliefs, prejudices and differences.

In Ecuador, behind every hill and on every beach there is a different version of culture, there is a different emphasis, and certainly, visions of life, which modulate, in accordance with the corresponding intimacy, the collective world. Civil society is a treasure, but it is a treasure in the process of being devalued, not only because of the phenomenon of globalization and massification, which are fearless like drought. What is serious is that, in addition, politics and propaganda, which is their way of concretization, sterilize perspectives, simplify judgments, expropriate thought and replace it with slogans, myths and post-truths that are built from television and networks, from discursive repetition and a radical phraseology that excludes any possibility of criticism. Thus diversity disappears, and the citizen becomes a consumer of entertainment, a voter of the government, a sounding board, a student who listens to the beadle. It is a kind of “echo culture” that dominates and devastates civil society, depriving it of creativity and the ability to disagree. And the one that destroys his wealth.

Simplification, which is the essence of all propaganda, generates in the masses a kind of “simple common sense”, judgments appropriate to the “times of a stupid homeland”, which are expressed in that “it must be so, because”, “it is better not to argue”. precisely, it consists of renouncing the critical ability, subjecting ourselves to what they tell us, coalescing faith in what they sell us. Thus, citizenship – the sovereignty of the individual – turns out to be a fiction of a dream from which no one wants to wake up, so as not to look grimly at the horizon and face by the responsibility of acting before the republic of obedience.. Man does not want to wake up from fear or interest, from calculation or fear, so much so that many people are more comfortable living between whispers and silence, even though such tactics are painfully undignified. (OR)