Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 27

The lessons of life have taught us how little use a political democracy will be, however well-balanced it may appear in its internal structures and institutional functioning, if it is not constituted as the basis for an effective and real economic democracy and for a no less real and effective cultural democracy. It may seem a worn-out old commonplace to say such a thing today about certain ideological concerns of the past, but it would be shutting our eyes to the simple historical truth if we were not to recognize that the democratic trinity—politics, economics, culture, each part complementing and enabling the others—at the height of its prosperity as an idea for the future represented one of the most passion-inspiring civic flags that in recent history has ever managed to awake consciences, mobilize wills, move hearts. Today, scorned and thrown into the rubbish heap of formulas that have been worn down by use and stripped of their true nature, the idea of economic democracy has given way to a market that is obscenely triumphant, even at the moment of an extremely serious crisis on its financial axis, whilst the idea of a cultural democracy has ended up being replaced by an alienating industrialized mass marketing of culture. We are not progressing, we are regressing. And it becomes ever more absurd to speak of democracy if we insist on mistakenly identifying it exclusively with the quantitative and mechanical expressions of it that we call political parties, parliaments, and governments, without paying any attention to their actual content and the distorted, abusive use they tend to make of the vote that justified them and placed them where they are.

You should not conclude from what I have just written that I am against the existence of parties: I am a member of one of them myself. You should not think that I abhor parliaments or their members: I would wish both to be better, more active and responsible in all things. Nor should you believe that I am the Providential creator of a magic recipe that will allow people henceforth to live without having to put up with bad government and waste time on elections that rarely solve the problems: I just refuse to accept that it is only possible to govern and wish to be governed according to the supposedly democratic models currently in use, which to my mind are distorted and incoherent, and which certain politicians (not always in good faith) want to make universal, along with the false promises of social development that barely manage to disguise the egotistical and relentless ambitions that really motivate them. We nurture these ills in our own home, then behave as though we were the inventors of a universal panacea capable of curing all the ills of the body and the spirit of the planet’s six thousand million inhabitants. Ten drops of our democracy three times a day and you will be happy forever. The truth is, the only really deadly sin is hypocrisy.