FEAR

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

II

“The voice / that could have been the remedy / but for fear / was nothing”.

It is time to take action against those who perceive the world simply as an immense market and the world’s inhabitants as mere consumers. It is time to apply our great stock of available knowledge to meet the challenges of a raging environment.

We must recover from our apathy, our fear. The first paragraph of the Preamble to the Universal Declaration that it has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of human kind "the advent of a world in which human beings, freed from fear and want, shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief…”.

From time immemorial humans have existed in very limited spaces, both physically and spiritually. Thus, with the exception of a few great minds capable of overcoming that confinement, they lived in fear of angry and merciless gods and lords of the manor here on earth. All possible efforts have been made to prevent citizens from abandoning their status as vassals. Until the 1980s education was always limited to teaching basic literacy and basic instruction on the part of the colonial powers, and authoritarian systems promoted indoctrination, dependence and herd mentality. There is no greater ignorance than the ignorance of a trapped man, and “kidnapped thought” (as Susan George calls it) leads to superstition… And this generates fanaticism, dogmatism, obstinacy and cowardice.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

All of us should read and reread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that it is worth the effort to continue fighting for the great ethical principles our daily behavior. In order to realize that we "are endowed with reason and conscience" to remedy the temptation to resort to force.

All of us, in solidarity without our fellow men, living together and devoted to each other “in a spirit of brotherhood”, in the words of Article 1.

All equal in dignity: regardless of the color of our skin, gender, beliefs or ideologies… All of us –as the Declaration indicates in its Preamble- studying and remembering both the letter and the spirit of Human Rights, at all levels and in all types of educational institutions, in the communications media, in parliaments, in municipal councils, at all levels of government, in NGOs, in international agencies… “without distinction based on the political status of countries and territories”.

This “active reading” is urgent, since our present errors are not being remedied. We are not decidedly replacing plutocracy with multilateralism. We are not finally closing tax havens that facilitate trafficking (in drugs, weapons and people!...). We are not regulating speculation or irresponsible economics. We are not off-setting the power of the media. We are not taking steps toward a new productive model of sustainable global development. As was the case before the crisis, the important thing is to barter, sell… to manufacture at the lowest possible cost by delocalizing to the East, where no one cares about the living conditions of the “manufacturers” in those countries, nor whether their human rights are protected… More of the same… while society continues to remain silent, looking the other way.

Although they were incapable of foreseeing or preventing the crisis, public institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as hardly impartial private institutions, are now acting in the interests of those who caused the present serious situation.

And what are the scientific, academic and artistic communities doing? They are generally distracted, subjugated spectators, controlled from afar by the media that prevent them from reflecting on our serious problems and acting in consequence.