And though Saul does not develop this theme much further, I ask myself what relationship this official passivity and faux fatalism bears to the documented decline in voter turnouts over the period in question...
But Saul doesn't go there. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
In the unequal combat against fear, in that combat that each one of us fights every day, what would become of us without the memory of dignity?
The world is suffering an alarming disparagement of dignity. The undignified, those who rule in this world, say that the undignified are the prehistoric, nostalgic, romantic, those who deny reality.
Every day, everywhere, we hear the eulogy to opportunism and the identification of realism with cynicism; the realism that requires elbowing and forbids the embrace; the realism of screw everything and fix it as you can and if not screw you.
The realism, too, of fatalism. This is the worst of the many ghosts seen today in our progressive government, here in Uruguay, and in other progressive governments of Latin America. The fatalism, perverse colonial inheritance, which forces us to believe that reality can be repeated, but it can't be changed, that what was is, and will be, that tomorrow is nothing more than another name for today.
-- Eduardo Galeano
which one reason why the slogan "Another World Is Possible" is so deeply radical. it defies the Calvinistic deterministic hubris of our elites, who require of us a mute and dejected fatalism, a failure to imagine anything better. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
