14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 28 December 2023 — Endogamy is the practice of marrying in closed groups, between individuals of common ancestry. Reproduction between parents who are closely related greatly increases the chances that the offspring will be affected by recessive traits or genetic impairments. One of the most notorious cases was King Charles II of Spain, known as the Bewitched.
The multi-pathological monarch was not able to learn to walk or talk until he was between six and nine years old. He died just shy of his 40th birthday, without any of the attempts to exorcise him being successful. His autopsy described “a heart the size of a peppercorn, corroded lungs, putrid intestines, a single coal-black testicle, and a head full of water.” His death, leaving no descendants, marked the end of the House of Austria.
Another case that has recently achieved notoriety is that of the Whittakers, in West Virginia. Its members suffer from various physical and mental anomalies and are known as the most endogamous family in the United States. Mark Laita, who introduced them to us, claims that they communicate with each other with howls and growls. His controversial documentary on YouTube has been seen by more than 40 million people.
As the model reproduces in a closed circle, it generates anomalies, recessive traits, philosophical and structural deterioration
Regimes that insist on maintaining a kind of ideological endogamy also run the risk of their system suffering the same ailments as Charles II of Spain and the Whittakers. As the model reproduces in a closed circle, it generates anomalies, recessive traits, philosophical and structural deterioration. Single-thinking systems breed increasingly mediocre leadership, not to mention the suffering they cause in the body of the societies they try to lead.
That is why the Cuban model is doomed to disappear, because its stubborn inbreeding, far from maintaining a supposed “ideological purity” that ensures power, is reproducing the same error code, with increasingly worse symptoms. From the Process of Rectification of Errors we moved to the Special Period, from the disastrous Battle of Ideas to an even worse Ordering Task, from an endless Coyuntura [roughly ‘temporary sitaution’] to an eternal Contingency, from a very poor Creative Resistance to the current (and ridiculous) War Economy.
Who knows what name they will give to this very long and incurable crisis in 2024. If Díaz-Canel was the smartest sperm generated by the Single Party, what can be expected from the most lagging gametes? There we have Alejandro Gil, perhaps the worst Minister of Economy on the planet, who does not blush when giving the same message of failure, year after year, without anyone thinking of doing him the favor of dismissing him.
There we have Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, the ill-fated former spy who today posts imbecilities from a position as useless as that of presiding over the most grotesque and impoverished mass organization of all those created by the regime to monitor us.
And things get worse if we look at the “new marabous” (they cannot be called “pines”). At least one limits oneself by launching very strong criticisms towards characters like Michel Torres Corona or Pedro Jorge Velázquez. It is not politically correct, in these times, to emphasize their disabilities. Although, in reality, theirs is more about political mountaineering and impudence.
The terrible thing is that all of us, even if we have escaped from the prison island, run the risk of reproducing its practices. The extreme polarization and algorithms of social networks lead us to consume ideas very similar to our own. And we can easily end up locked in circles that reproduce exclusive new thoughts.
Debate is almost an obsolete word. The ’cool’ thing is to say that so-and-so “swept the floor” with so-and-so, or vice versa
Debate is almost an obsolete word. The cool thing is to say that so-and-so “swept the floor” with so-and-so, or vice versa. This obsession with headlines related to the same domestic task shows a great lack of imagination, but it is the result of the intellectual laziness of our time. No one wants to get tangled up in the conflict of having to decide between two divergent opinions. The correct one, a priori, is whoever thinks like me, period.
So, if you can’t reason with another, insult him. If you run out of arguments, launch a smear. If you can’t see the curvature on the horizon, shout that the earth is flat! Most have never climbed so high and they may even applaud you.
I already know that pluralism is not fashionable. But perhaps, just perhaps, respecting the diversity of opinion is the only effective remedy to eradicate, once and for all, that ideological endogamy that we carry in our blood.
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