I was talking to a friend two days ago about the prevailing system today, about what the system is or should be like and its implementation.
I was reflecting on what our system has become, a system commanded by technocrats, bureaucrats and other managers. It is not that they are not capable, which they are and very much so, but a system determines the functioning of a State. Here came my reflection on the reservation that professional politicians have about the assault that the intellectual can carry out.
The difference between a politician and an intellectual is that the politician has the obligation to observe the political arena and adapt to it, while the intellectual must be able to reinvent it, even be able to change the course of rivers, to break down borders. Intellectual work involves laying the foundations for making another cartography of the territory.
It is not that the intellectual and the politician are contradictory figures, two opposing moral categories. Politicians, bad; intellectuals, good.
There are many intellectuals who have exercised politics and many politicians who have been recognized intellectuals. For example, Gramsci, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Miguel de Unamuno and countless others.
Times have changed, everything has become a commodity. Power has become specialized, it has spread its tentacles everywhere. The union between political, financial and media power has built impermeable castles in which it is almost impossible to enter or leave alive.
Luis García Montero rightly says: "So those who think the most and the best (allow this primary definition of intellectual) are compelled to make the leap into public affairs." Politics reaches its moment of greatest discredit when the windows no longer open to the street, "but when that happens, when everything seems toxic and corrupt, no matter how much those windows are opened, it is the air of the street that no longer wants to enter Parliament, and Machado already said: "Beware of those who tell you not to get involved in politics, that is because they want to do politics for you."
So intellectuals form a social group that tries to educate the population, propose debates and explain certain phenomena. In this sense, it is argued that intellectuals have a moral duty to encourage critical reflection.
Sitting on the "sofa of power" things look different, but the interesting thing is to determine if intellectuals will contribute characteristics different from those of the professional politician. The web of politics has deteriorated, and intellectuals must contribute new, clean ideas, impregnate the system with a fresh air, a trade wind of those that whisper our paradise, called the Canary Islands. If there is no thought and reflection, there is no politics.
In the Soviet Encyclopedia of Stalin's time, intellectuals were defined pejoratively as "those who doubt", but doubt is reflection, meditating, choosing, questioning.
By David Toledo Niz, student of Political Science and Administration.
