This is an invitation to reflection, open, respectful, tolerant, with the raising of consciousness and pluralism that focuses on the common good and on the role that we must assume in a new emerging society. The idea is to promote critical thinking focused on unity and self-criticism of the various actors in society involved, to promote unity in uniqueness and a sense of community.
By CARLOS CANTERO OJEDA / Photo: ARCHIVE
The battle that is being waged in the world, on all imaginable fronts, is the tension between the overwhelming display of materialism and the containment represented by spirituality, anchoring principles, the reversal of value opacity, respect for limits that aim at the integrity and dignity of the human person and his full material and spiritual fulfillment.
In recent decades, at a global and continental level, secular humanism has lost presence and influence in society. It is necessary to rethink the role that we must play, beyond what is superfluous or trivial, if we want to safeguard the validity of the values that we swear to respect and preserve.
We must enhance the comprehensive capacity of the new reality, the institutional adaptability to the challenges of the 21st century and the demands of the digital society, highly interconnected and interdependent, where information and communication technologies play a determining role in the ability to viralize ideas. and value contagion.
It is necessary to reflect on our challenges, anchored in humanist principles and values, stripped of ideologies and sectarianisms, which are very subordinate, the light of the changing and dizzying world in which we have had to live. Freethinkers must assume the first line, the challenge of being coherent and consistent with the valuable legacy of our predecessors who made history and committing ourselves to the construction of a society with more freedom, equality and fraternity.
THE PANDEMETIC
It is a process in which a community is affected by an evil, a disease, which spreads (goes viral and spreads) to many territories, which attacks the population of a time-space. It occurs when a new virus emerges or a mutation spreads and most individuals have no immunity. The expression, by extension, can be applied to social, economic or other processes, as well as the concepts of: a) autoimmunity associated with the treatment of otherness and b) psychosomatic that is linked to self-sameness.
The concept “pandemética” is proposed as a neologism, a word composed of pandemic and ethics, which indicates the process of ethical degradation, which goes viral with a high rate of contagion, at great speed, destroying the social, public and private fabric, in which global space-time. It is a value mutation, which spreads vertiginously, a viral process that finds most individuals without immunity, inducing socio-cultural “inflammation and fever”.
It has differentiated impacts according to the different ethos, which may or may not be favorable to its development, depending on the immunology (cultural and values) of each population. It is about the opacity of the limits in society, a degradation of values, a permissive relativism, a crisis in the relationality of the ethos, which ends up affecting ethics, aesthetics and emotionality.
This socio-cultural crisis is structural, it is the tension between the interior and the exterior in the human being, it has philosophical and ethical foundations, it is not a local issue, not even a continental one, but a global phenomenon that reaches rich and poor countries, left and right, of various religions and spiritualities. It is the essential tension of our culture, between the material and the spiritual. A minimalist vision of the dignity of people and the sense of community, which promote ideologies with a materialistic bias. It has to do with the weakening of the foundations of culture and society: an overflowing individualism, the weakening of the dignity of the human person, due to nihilism and hedonism, a sense of immediacy, a degrading thingism that exudes materialism.
ICT REVOLUTION AND DIGITAL SOCIETY
The revolution in ICT (information and communication technologies), changes the social relationality and the temporal-spatial dimensions, changing the centrality, proximity, accessibility and connectivity of individuals and organizations.
Social relations mutate from verticality to horizontality; change the communication paradigm; a new value of diversity emerges that brings with it a new pluralism, social networks, access to information and communication technologies, which are increasingly cheaper and more powerful, is democratized.
The elite and its influence are determined by its adaptive capacities to the digital society, an issue in which politics has shown blindness and ineptitude, unlike what has been observed in civil society.
The process is influenced by the emergence of the digital society, virtuality and its influence on the new expression of mass society. The fundamental change impacts the relationality of people, the ability to influence generated by digital social networks, the divinization of big data without considering people, the invasion of the subjectivity of individuals in an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent way. , enabling new ways to influence and manage mass audiences (without their consent).
In this context, new challenges and conflicts emerge that make structural sense, promote a change in the model or paradigm, with cultural categories such as: environment, native peoples, global warming, migration, sexual minorities, socio-economic asymmetries, gender, color, among others. others.
With the wide diffusion of ICTs, the forms of conflict change, drifting towards cybernetic, physical and biological attacks, making them more selective or massive according to convenience. There are also greater capacities for mimicry, for concealment, particularly when there are technological and knowledge asymmetries regarding digital usability.
Column by Carlos Cantero: Characterization of social movements (part II)
CARLOS CANTERO
(Punta Arenas, November 11, 1956). Doctor in Sociology, geographer and independent politician. Senator for the 2nd Circumscription, Antofagasta Region, from 1998 to 2014, for two consecutive terms. Deputy for District No. 3, Antofagasta Region, between 1990 and 1998. Mayor of the municipalities of Sierra Gorda, Tocopilla and Calama between 1983 and 1988.
