A good and long reply, Pepe, and let me first mention that I am not in disagreement with what you are saying. Plus, you say it well. But where you put me in the spot light of being Euro-centric, and I have to put you in the spot light of being anti-Euro-centric. Not until you overcome yourself is there any empowerment available for you. You can rage against the machine you can't control, fine. But the point I am making is that you are not controlling the machine that you have (some) control over.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is an excellent expose, which shows that the European nations were simply able to benefit from a geographical reality. In the Americas, the largest setting is North-South, whereas Eurasia's largest setting is East-West.
Plants, animals are more easily shared East-West because there is one long bandwidth of the same climate going on. In the Americas going from North to South many different climates are encountered, and plants and animals can therefore shared less among these climates.
If one has more tools, more food, more animals to pick from, one develops quicker. Note how quicker is not automatically smarter.
What I like about the point is that there is nothing special about Europeans; they are just like everyone else, but they developed at a global scale. Plus, their internal struggles made them power hungry. At an essential level, tribal reality underlies the European struggles. There is no one Europe, just like Patagonia is nothing like Ecuador or Alaska. Indigenous people across the planet have always been fighting each other. And in Europe, those fights also ended up being global fights.
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Here is a map of the democratic nations in the world. You can see how in Europe the hodgepodge is real. There is a battle going on, still. You can read this map as a stalemate of systems in the world. I see a liberation of tribal people that got established to some extent in Europe but even there is stalled.
You can see the UK outside the realm of democratic nations because they have a divide-and-conquer voting system in place, just like the US. They do not have a democracy, but just winner-take-all.
Proportional voting is like tribal voting; it encourages discussion and only at the final point the majority agrees what the direction is, often with a lot more than the simple majority supporting it. In the UK and the US? Not the case. It is group think and often inaction as a political result that benefits those that like inaction (think big companies).
What I can offer is structural thought. What I can offer is information about political systems. Ecuador has a voting system that represses its people. Meanwhile Ecuadorians have access to their political system, so there are options for change that will make Ecuador have more of that tribal wisdom that you can embrace, Pepe.
Ecuadorians have to tell each other about it. You have to see that there is a false democracy and there is a true democracy. I read in your words that what you desire is the true democracy but you call it out differently. Meanwhile you rage against democracy not making a distinction between the real and the fake version.
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In the US, I took a hiphop class in which we were actually divvied up pretty well into four groups (out of 200 students). From largest quarter to smallest quarter: about a quarter was black, a quarter white, a quarter asian, and a quarter latino.
Then, our teachers asked us to form groups based on our skin color and have each group create a ranking of the four groups from most powerful to least powerful. Since I was a foreigner, I decided to sit on the edge of the white group and look at all four groups.
After not too long, the white group took a vote, majority rule and they got things settled. The other groups did not take a vote; they discussed and discussed, and I could tell that they were discussing this among themselves, not just one leader and the rest, but group talk. Since it took much longer, the white group decided to take another vote, same result, and this was their signaling the others that there was a fast route to making up ones mind.
I loved it, because it showed me that the other groups had learned that majority rule was not helpful for minorities at all. They had to come up with a different methodology to get themselves expressed. Meanwhile, the white group could not believe that the other groups did not pick the fast route of majority rule.
Since I knew about the other form of democracy, I was actually disappointed in the strong ideology captured inside these white heads. They truly believed strongly that their form of democracy was the way to go. I knew better, but then again, I was the foreigner.
As quick note, all groups put the white group in top as most powerful. Most had blacks at the bottom, but the latino group put themselves at the bottom. That was a good insight as well. When I lived in Latin-America and encountered black folks, tourists, my first thought when I saw them was 'Americans' and not 'black folks'. One can recognize Statelings quite easily, and as such the latino group placing themselves at the bottom of the four groups made a lot of sense to me.
That the other groups placed blacks at the bottom of the four groups was logical as well. Most of the racial culture in the USA is about blacks being suppressed (which is absolutely true) and other mechanisms of suppression are actually not discussed with the same strength of words. The large group of white people being suppressed, for instance, is quite substantial, but that is whitewashed, not recognized, not discussed much (except by the whites that are experiencing suppression, pointing at others that are blamed in their minds).
When a system of divide-and-conquer is put in place (winner-take-all is a system of haves and have-nots) then the ones that have may be recognized overall as whites, but the striation of society is such that many whites belong to the have-nots. That information is often ignored.
The true divide-and-conquer is not discussed. Folks enter their own specific rabbit hole and then tell others not in that hole that they don't know the truth of the matter. Yet it is exactly at the first point of saying 'we against them' that the game of divide-and-conquer already won. Inside your mind, you already divided yourself to belonging to one group, raging against another group. You divided yourself, and if we can point at historical figures that divided Ecuadorians, then we can still say that Ecuadorians are dividing themselves today without the help of any of these historical figures.
I must mention this: when a young elephant is trained by elephant handlers, they put a stick in the ground with a rope that keeps the little elephant in place. The young elephant will pull on the rope, but the stick in the ground is stronger.
Then, as an adult, the elephant does not challenge the rope and the stick anymore. The little stick can get pulled out by the elephant very easily. But the elephant stays in place, because the stick is in the ground. It got trained to believe something that was true once, but that is not true any longer. It keeps the elephant tied up.
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Pepe, you and I control just what you and I control. Education how control functions is more important than pointing out which group is to blame. Pointing out which group is to blame is a symptom of divide-and-conquer. Those pushed toward the bottom are pushed down so much they need a person or group to blame just to get their own heads above water.
Is Ecuador dominated by external forces? Yes, we agree. Are Ecuadorians doing enough to get themselves out of this external game they were caught in? That is where you and I are discussing our affairs.
You point at the external factors that are near-totally out of your and my control. I, the foreigner, am pointing at the internal factors over which some control can be exerted, if Ecuadorians educate themselves about power systems.
I am completely with you that we need to move toward the natural socio-economic system, getting the planet back in balance. The true form of democracy aids; the fake form of democracy undermines.
One last word about the fake democracy:
It is competition for the sake of competition. You and I know how that is very destructive for the planet.
So, back to the happy nations, because they are caught in this competition with the winner-take-all nations as well. They either must create barriers (trade barriers) to protect themselves, or they must be as good at the game as the competitive nations. Meanwhile, they do have higher minimum wages than the winner-take-all nations. They do have higher taxes on the rich and big companies. They have a system of full representation. Everyone is part of the decision making process. In the UK and the US, only the winners are found in the room where the decisions are made — fake democracy.
Keep up the good fight, Pepe. But make sure it is the good fight.
