The Vicious Circle of History

I once heard that the history of humanity unfolds trapped in a cycle of: false freedom, dictatorship, crisis, and revolution. That statement made a certain impression on me at the time, because for me it practically described the fate to which humanity has been subjected ever since the rise of civilizations. Any historical event you might select at random can be fitted perfectly into that cycle. Declarations of independence, coups d'état, uprisings, protests, economic crises, wars, power struggles, prosperity, economic growth... Merely by determining the stage of the cycle in which a given event lies, we might even be able to anticipate the scenarios that follow. In addition to that cycle, we can also add that the social structure generally remains constant if we group all of its elements as follows: citizens, slaves, and kings. Both the cycle and the social structure referred to here would hold equally well whether we place ourselves in the second century, the fifteenth century, or the twenty-first century; it would be exactly the same model. We would only need to note that, for the purposes of this text, the king might appear under different designations: dictator, emperor, despot, caudillo, tyrant, president, prime minister. We must not confuse the designation used with the qualities of the person who holds it, for we may find emperors, dictators, caudillos, or despots who are useful to their people, some useful only to themselves, and others who are useless. The dictatorship, on the other hand, could also be associated with the following names: fiefdom, state, democracy... Whatever name is used, they are useful to us insofar as they refer to the exercise of power by a group or a person. Unfortunately, in the events humanity has recorded, a curious pattern of behavior can be observed: the passive role of citizens. However contradictory or invalid this assertion may seem, one could say that citizens have not participated actively in the aforementioned cycle. They tend to remain on the sidelines of the actions that make it possible to move from one stage of the cycle to another. This for a simple reason: citizens are, in the end, a kind of accomplice of power. In any society, we could say that this mass of people whom we circumstantially call citizens always establishes an implicit pact with the power of the day: work in exchange for money, well-being in exchange for surrendering rights, economic freedom in exchange for authoritarianism or totalitarianism... We can identify countless pacts that citizens establish with those who exercise power. Pacts whose sole aim is to sustain, for as long as possible, the first three phases of the cycle: false freedom, dictatorship, and crisis. Dictatorship takes place when the pacts begin to be configured in an unbalanced and one-sided way, granting those who hold power ever greater prerogatives and control over social life. Crisis arises when the pacts begin to crumble, yet even knowing this, citizens continue to be the mainstay of power. Content or not, in agreement or not, power feeds on citizens through their labor, energy, creativity, knowledge, strength, or money. Once the crisis has set in, it is not the citizens who take action, but the slaves, the forgotten, the marginalized, the downtrodden, the abandoned, the abused, the violated. It is ironic that those who have the fewest resources, or perhaps none at all, are the ones who take the initiative to confront the king, the emperor, the dictator, or whoever wields power. The reason this happens is simply that slaves have nothing to lose. Having nothing to lose, they lack fear, expectations, control, rationality. It is understandable that a being who has lost everything, who has hit rock bottom, and who has walked his path in darkness for a long time should be the only one capable of taking the most radical actions. Incredible or not, many facts confirm that it is the slave who ends up overthrowing power. Under this logic, which might seem unnatural from the outset, the roles are reversed: the citizens emerge as the true slaves, and the slaves become agents of change. As though it were a metaphor drawn from Taoism, perhaps within the darkness that has surrounded a slave's life a light emerges, accompanied by a force—but not an ordinary force, rather one capable of destroying any emperor, of facing any challenge, and of overcoming any obstacle. We may infer that at this stage the slave has infinite possibilities. Perhaps granted upon leaving his comfort zone (as crazy as it may seem, any individual, regardless of social position, can be in a comfort zone), the very zone in which the citizen still finds himself. The slave is undoubtedly an atypical being, because we might think that the only valuable thing he possesses is his life, and yet he is already dead. Not literally, of course, but he has already accepted his death, and this happened when everything he deemed worthy was torn away from him. Having been stripped in such a way, all that remains in his spirit are the most intense feelings: resentment, vengeance, hatred... This usually ends up forming a powerful destructive motivation, and this is when the emperors should begin to worry. The crisis has now unfolded, and the slaves begin to transform into the force that sooner or later ends up overthrowing power. It is worth noting that, besides the slaves, other emperors or highly influential external agents can provoke revolutions and influence crises; however, they will necessarily have to make use of the slaves. After a well-deserved crisis, society enters the stage of revolution, rebellion, uprising. It seems absurd that it is the king himself who produces, subjugates, and sustains those who will eventually lead his own overthrow. Why, then, do kings run the risk of having slaves? Perhaps because every system of power needs slaves. Citizens fulfill their role in favor of power, but slaves are willing to do anything in exchange for practically nothing. The key event originates when the slave breaks, which is related to the rejection of his destiny and the discarding of hope. Once the conditions are in place, the revolution does not end until the slave sees his aspirations fulfilled. That is why the saying that hope is the last thing to be lost, that everything has its time, and other similar ones remain so effective at pacifying energies, giving power precisely the opportunity it needs to discern the intentions of the slaves and do away with them before they begin to cause trouble. Those who delve into historical facts eventually come to see how power takes it upon itself to erase the actions or achievements led by the slaves. It is the citizens, playing the role of faithful servants, endowed with reason and enlightenment, who take the spotlight, who declare independence, who sign the charters. Because were it otherwise, later societies would grow up knowing that slaves can be dangerous, that they are capable of subduing emperors and even of exterminating them. Now then, how does the transition from revolution to false freedom come about? It will not be very difficult to convince oneself that most slaves are distinguished not by their intelligence but by their courage and strength. With little enlightenment left once revolutions come to an end, it is to be expected that the foundations of the new society will not be perfect, that the pacts they build will be weak, abusive, unjust. Greed, the thirst for power, and ambition emerge and, given the low levels of energy, there is not enough spirit to confront those imbalances. The pacts end up being accepted hypocritically, merely to bring the longed-for peace to those who did not participate actively in the conflict: the citizens. And this is how one finally arrives at the aforementioned false freedom, only to devolve once again into some form of dictatorship, giving way to another classic crisis and ending in an explosive revolution. Forever and ever, until the end of humanity, the cycle is fulfilled, like a kind of macabre joke about man, who at times appears to be a thinking creature. © Alejandro Guipe | All Rights Reserved.