By Luis Alemany

“Being different is neither good nor bad. It just means that you are brave enough to be yourself.» Albert Camus

Although it may seem incredible, at this point in history, there are those who believe that Uruguay is a country without direction. They are not foreigners who do not have the slightest idea about the history of this small nation of the South American southern cone for more than two centuries. The most astonishing thing is that those who believe, blindly, that Uruguay is sailing aimlessly are some Uruguayans who expect to direct in the future the destinies of this nation.

The paradox is that for any foreign observer, given the unstable regional and world situation, in the midst of such turbulent waters, Uruguay is worthy of admiration for how it has managed to emerge gracefully from the pandemic that affected all humanity and, until now, of the multiple consequences of the war in progress, for almost a year, after the criminal and retrograde Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Despite so many adversities in recent years, all the social and economic indicators are more than eloquent in demonstrating that Uruguay is one of the best directed countries, both regionally and globally. Let’s just state that the growth rate in 2022, worldwide, barely exceeded 3% and that of Uruguay registered 5%.

As far as human societies are concerned, modern historians have succeeded in distinguishing differentiated cycles that are part of both, short history and long history. Octavio Paz warned us that this distinction of modern historians, in our Latin America, had already been discovered by the Mayans.

And in the current maelstrom of daily events in current societies, exalted by the irruption of social networks -in the infant stage of the computer age-, for any uninformed observer, the panorama becomes very confusing, not very promising and very auspicious, for nihilistic and apocalyptic visions. The exaltation of the negative facts of the short story hide the most fruitful steps that are inscribed in the account of the long story.

The long history of humanity is marked by the millennial evolution of intelligence, when it began to intuit that our species has the capacity that distinguishes it from others: human beings do not reproduce, but rather have the gift of creating unique creatures. and intelligent as, in the second half of the 20th century, genetic discoveries have shown it. These discoveries have confirmed to us that, from the very moment of our conception -by the work and grace of the love that united the parents-, we are a possibility of being who we are, among millions upon millions of possibilities of being a different person.

In this radical truth of our nature as a species, finds its main reason for being the very recent phenomenon of the founding of modern democratic societies, after so many millions of years of presence in this world and the millenary reign of authoritarianism. But the development, also millennial, of human intelligence, has been the main architect in the patient construction of long history.

Likewise, authoritarianism continues to be, in our days, the greatest scourge that plagues most human societies and the greatest threat that modern democratic societies must face.

Although this phenomenon is very worrying today, the most dramatic period occurred in the 20th century, when the ideological phenomena of nazi-fascism and communism broke out, attracting the support of important popular sectors and ending up annihilating millions of people.

But those reactionary utopias of the 20th century do not resign themselves to disappearing in the 21st century. They continue to battle to this day, using all means at their disposal to combat, in the short story, the inexorable tendencies of the long story.

And, this phenomenon is having a very strong impact on the very new modern democratic societies, from the oldest and, much more, on the most recent.

Suffice it to remember that, among 167 countries, to date, only 23 are considered full democracies. And, in our suffering Latin America, only three qualify: Uruguay, which leads them, followed by Chile and Costa Rica.

But if we stop to reflect on the long history, we find the explanation of why Uruguay is among the first fully democratic societies in the world concert and the first in Latin America.

The foundations are found in the essential part of the Instructions of 1813, mandating the construction of a State governed by the independence of its three powers – Executive, Legislative and Judicial – consecrating «civil and religious liberties in all their imaginable extension». It is true that it took us little more than a century -until the Constitution of 1916- to finish building it and that we had to overcome dark periods in the 20th century, but from which, the democratic society re-emerged with renewed force.

Already in 1926, José Ortega y Gasset, presaging the dramatic and tragic years to come, in the «Rebellion of the masses», warned: » Revolutions, so incontinent in their hypocritically generous rush to proclaim rights, have always violated , trampled and broken the fundamental right of man, so fundamental, that it is the very definition of his substance: the right to continuity. The only radical difference between human history and «natural history» is that the former can never begin anew. Köhler and others have shown how the chimpanzee and the orangutan differ from man not in what, strictly speaking, we call intelligence, but because they have much less memory than we do. The poor beasts find each morning that they have forgotten almost everything they have experienced the day before, and their intellect has to work on a minimum material of experience. Likewise, today’s tiger is identical to that of six thousand years ago, because each tiger has to start being a tiger again, as if there had never been one before. Man, on the other hand, thanks to his power to remember, accumulates his own past, possesses it and takes advantage of it. Man is never a first man: he begins to exist from then on at a certain altitude of accumulated past tense. This is man’s unique treasure, his privilege and his sign. And the lesser wealth of that treasure consists of what seems correct and worth preserving about it: what is important is the memory of mistakes, which allows us not to make the same ones all the time. The true treasure of man is the treasure of his mistakes, the long life experience decanted drop by drop over millennia. That is why Nietzsche defines the superior man as the being «of the longest memory .»

Similar reflections that date from the same period, we find in the works of the Uruguayan Carlos Vaz Ferreira, when both did not know that their reflections, forged on the altitude of that piled up past , according to Ortega y Gasset, were cementing the construction of the legacy of the most important thing that the 20th century would leave us, the Philosophy of Intelligence, as revealed to us in the year 2000, another compatriot, Arturo Ardao, in his «Logic of Reason, Logic of Intelligence.»

Hence, if someone unprepared, in this initial 2023, after everything they have lived and thought about, can come to believe that our country has no direction, they will only display an olympic ignorance.

Luis Alemañy, January 9, 2023.