Faith in justice

 Faith in justice

Notes from the ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

Human affairs have a turning point that goes unnoticed, the relativity and intersubjectivity that allow it to appear to be a non-existent reality, as if some aliens observe that at a crossroads a machine emits green, yellow and red colors, and that creatures aboard machines with wheels, that when the color red turns, stop walking, and as soon as the color turns green, they resume their march, and no matter how much they analyze the machine of colors, they realize that the power to stop or advance the rolling machines that drive those strange creatures called "humans" does not come from them, but from the imaginary world that those creatures that walk upright on two legs made real.

In the end, it is the agreement between human beings that has allowed us to accept a series of rules, norms, precepts, concepts, etc., with which we order group or community life. Another thing is the process that allows us to recognize and internalize that imaginary world and make it the real human world.

They say that “the letter enters with blood,” a metaphor that allows us to understand that internalizing the letter, making it part of our memory to remember, and with that memory making present that human world of rules, norms, processes, systems, etc., allows us to stay at the top of the evolutionary pyramid.

What is the difference with the other creatures that inhabit this planet called “Earth” is the breadth of the capacity to reason and not only respond to a “reflex action” inherent to the biological nature of man, but also have the most developed faculty of “memory and forgetfulness”, which allows us to organize and recognize this “fictional” reality as “the real”, since we will never be able to see another living animal cross itself when passing by a temple with a cross or another symbol of faith and beliefs, nor build “institutions of punishment”, unless we understand as “institution of punishment” what properly represents the struggle for survival within that evolutionary chain of the living world.

The debate remains current, there is only one nature, or there is, that of the natural world and that of the human, independently of that, we can ask ourselves, how the human being came to pass from fiction to reality, and make that color “red” have the force and the “concrete” reality to stop our walk in those rolling machines in which we transport ourselves, the answer has to do with the construction of our own subjectivity and intersubjectivity that allows us “the madness of two”, as a relationship between the psychotic and the hysterical.

The weight of this human reality is in the de facto recognition of the reality of subjectivity within intersubjectivity, and for this, the only way to do it has been by building a network of signifiers, language, which allows us to navigate in a single reality from different positions that are sometimes equidistant, that is, that as much as we make words into tongue twisters of individual positions of interpretation of reality, at least each word used has a real human dimension, even those reduced to simple sexual reiterations as in psychopathology, or, the breadth and creative art of a genius, or, the abundant minimums of the normal man who agrees to recognize that every time a traffic light turns red we have to stop, and recognize that if we do not do so, we are committing an infraction of the traffic law of our place where we live.

Although this whole intersubjective world that we create has to do with the survival of the human species, there are powerful human forces that oppose this intersubjective world, which is also human, and which has to do with entropy and the death drive (the latter according to Freud), so we must not overlook the fact that man fights against himself, and the human species is permanently threatened not only by the indomitable forces of nature but also by its own “human nature” (the latter was also said by Freud).

It is punishment, enforcement and the right to apply force that is the only guarantee of keeping at bay that self-annihilation inherent to man, with this we can understand the contradictory world of the human being, who on the one hand appeals to order, and on the other hand, acts violently and selfishly, being the only species whose history has been the history of its external and internal wars, a history marked by suffering and death, so we have not seen any idyllic period of perpetual peace and pre-established harmony, they are the selfish and individualistic powers that are constantly fighting against the intersubjective world that demands submission and castration.

If we look at the agreement, it looks like an “act of faith” where each individual strives to accept that the gods exist and that the social and public world exists, that its rules are the only guarantee of survival, and that it is not the law of the dominant male of the clan that prevails over the agreement and good will, there is something dogmatic and elements of faith in the human world.

We have made an intricate framework of rules, norms, processes, institutions to give order to life in society, rules that overlap one another, and we even speak of “magna carta” as if these texts, like “the sacred scripture” of the Bible, were of another superior nature, and even some men, when elected by their people, swear before the Bible before their constitutional “magna carta”, thinking that the oath before a divine being is the guarantee that a mortal matter like public power will not be corrupted.

In the same way, we see how politicians tear their clothes to argue for the convenience of a modification of a human law, and this may be to add another layer of protection against the selfish and impulsive forces that coexist in the human being, we resort to the absurdity of supervising the supervisor of the prosecutor, because we do not have enough faith that we can protect the laws that govern human life. And it is when we realize that "the letter does not only enter with blood", with suffering, or punishments, but also with education, with that teaching-learning process that allows us to prepare for life in society, this being the only guarantee that will allow us the recognition or faith in the committed word, and the co-responsibility of the construction of our public spaces, the Greeks introduced the paideia, not only for "physical upbringing, but the highest educational ideal of the Greeks: teaching of honor and respect, moral and ethical qualities; educational admonition, constant advice and spiritual guidance; as well as the formation of man through the care of an already formed man.”

But teaching faith in rationality, the love of wisdom, also implies talking about, how does one make an educated man? Or, well, how is our subjectivity built from intersubjectivity? And that process is psychological, not pedagogical, it implies norm, law, internalization, revaluation, desire, etc., and, for that reason, the attempts to educate the human being in the recognition of the law fail, because it places him in a wrong dimension, as we see them in their forums, with their back and forth, among their reductionist arguments or arbitrary generalizations, and the multifactorial approach is not allowed, I am talking about the much-discussed judicial reform, but we can also make the same criticism of other issues such as violence and insecurity, poverty, etc.

I believe that “giving to each his own” has to take into account human nature itself, and, from there, we can approach the issue of justice first of all as an act of faith, and, because if we cannot recover goodness as a fundamental element to give certainty to human acts, it is presented to us as a petition of principle to reduce the law only to punishment and force.

It is worth asking the political class to show acts of faith and goodness, because human affairs cannot remain an infinite and relative construction, human nature is as vital as physical nature.