14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 4 January 2022 — The main marketing operation of certain leftist politics throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st has been to sell an elusive product labeled utopia.
Any remotely decent person should feel miserable if they don’t agree with that chimera that tends to associate itself to an unreachable horizon, which should guide those who instead of believing that “a possible world is better” maintain that “a better world is possible.”
While it seems like a play on words, in the difference between one optic and the other lie the lives of nations and of people, because what is advisable at the end of the path is what determines the route and the route is the day-to-day, the life of those who purchase tickets to one destination or another.
Politicians shouldn’t have the right to place the fantasies of poets in their electoral programs nor in their justifications for holding on to power. Rarely have poets converted their verses into electoral slogans, though they’ve declared parties, “party until it stains,” as Gabriel Celaya defined “the necessary verses” when he said, “They are cries in the heavens and acts on earth.”
But the acts on earth have different consequences than cries in the heavens because time on earth is human and heavenly time is ethereal. This is why it is possible to say that Eden was the first documented utopia and, as is well known, it is Adam’s fault that it didn’t work. The first human disobeyed the rules and, with that, thwarted the original plan. The consequence was that Adam, along with his long lineage, was condemned to earning his sustenance through sweat, that is, work.
Karl Marx, who rarely needed to work to feed his family, imagined communist society as a place where material goods flowed, where those who benefited from them were free to spend their time on many recreational activities and where work would no longer be necessary, but rather be done for pleasure.
It is not an exaggeration to associate that communist utopia with Pinocchio’s Land of Toys, imagined by Collodi, where vacations begin on January 1st and end on December 31st. Work was not necessary, nor was school, but those who let themselves be fooled by these promises ended up dumb.
It is legitimate to suspect that leaders who promote these political utopias, be it scientific communism or 21st century socialism, know perfectly well that their biggest promises — those that are set in the long term, and for which they demand nameless sacrifices — will never be fulfilled. This is why triumphalism becomes a common denominator of these “leaders of peoples” who, in light of good will, appear to be blind, naive or delusional, when they are actually just cynical.
There are plenty of historical, literary and mystical examples that demonstrate the gross manipulation to which those individuals recruited into fanatical sects with the hope of reaching paradise on earth are subjected. Behind the slogans, teeming with bad poetry used to mobilize the masses, there is usually some theoretical foundation, almost always difficult to understand, for the consumption of the newly initiated. Further back, or further down, lies that unspeakable truth that is not even put on the table when the hierarchs are designing their ambitious plans.
In those cabals, everyone wears their mask and they all know the others wear them as well. Utopia is invoked like an invisible specter, the memory of some founding father is revered, and any act that suggests an intent to reveal the great secret is viewed with distrust… until one day reality appears at the window or knocks down the door.
Translated by: Silvia Suárez
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