Néstor Galarraga - The Power of the Warrior

Going back to the education topic, the world changes and becomes transformed constantly, and education rests on fixed parameters and standardized criteria. This is contradictory indeed. But I want to be clear about something: I honor the ways of the past; I do not assert that it was better, but the embodiment of the master was anchored in the example, in the model. The master was someone who had mastership and who educated. Nowadays, the educational system passes on information, instead of shaping or educating. In any case, the name of the system should change from educational to informative or normative, and its foundations should be revised. We should consider the possibility of distinguishing some aspects in a system that takes into account multiple knowledge or intelligence, physical knowledge, alternative disciplines… I insist: at school the model should be redefined… Everything generating a greater identification or motivation of the student with the learning process. We all have different ways of learning, because we have different abilities and types of intelligence. We should understand, as well, that true education goes through discipline, order and has nothing to do with uniformity or conformity. We need to form and not to conform, even when the latter is easier to achieve. In other words, Julio César Labaké says: education is not possible without helping to discover paths, without the awareness that we are awakening another human being and coming along with that individual´s eye-opening, because every student is our only alternative of a future.

Without an education of quality, it is impossible to leave behind ignorance, poverty, subjugation. Without education, it is easy to control both the individual and the collective conscience. Without education, society is a tamed mass, easy to dominate and control. Our representatives know this and they are only interested in gaining votes… Unprincipled and unmistaken, they are committed to building a country of total and complete ignorant, poor and uneducated people. I do not believe in the revolution. I only think about the evolution of human beings. However, without an educational revolution, we will remain subjected in some way. There is no other alternative than a profound, authentic, real and sustained change, in pursuit of individual and collective growth and development. Education is the only and most powerful tool.

The world changes and it is transformed constantly and permanently. It moves convulsively and we live surrounded by a growing sense of insecurity. It conquers all of us, as we witness, with consternation these changes and transformations. Institutions such as the family, partner relations, working systems and the set of rules by which past generations operated are now under crisis, and that alleged sense of safety disappears. It takes us back to another time. The feeling is that all social institutions with a sense of belonging have ultimately failed.

Moreover, people are sick of listening to the speeches of revolution from millionaires whose money came from politics; people do not believe in politicians and their power to do good anymore. They think they are not in politics following a call to serve others but to serve themselves. People do not believe that they have the ability to solve the problems presented by a collective coexistence, nor do they see that politics is being used as a tool to promote Common Good. They only seek to hold up to power and to corruption, indefinitely. Politically, in Argentina, everything is a joke; corruption and fraud are laughable. We are used to calling it creole´s cunning (viveza criolla), but the social situation in general is pathetic… Political power is used strategically as the art of defrauding. People do not trust police officers and, least of all, in justice. We live overwhelmed by a growing and alarming wave of violence and insecurity. People do not believe in religion either. There is a detachment to everything that is religious, and faith is something as changeable as reason or sleep. I am not talking about believing in God or inner searching; I am referring to everything that has to do with trusting in the Church, in the Faith that has been entrusted to a great number of pedophiles who are in charge of the institution; they do not represent the institution entirely, of course, but they are an important minority.

Unfortunately, no one believes in the power that is made with others; neither in a society that builds in an individualistic manner. Thus, the sense of community, of collectiveness, of social communion loses weight before the idea of saving oneself and at any price. And solidarity, sad and powerless, becomes simply a utopia.

We live in a society where friends, workmates, classmates, couples become competitors, like in sports. Particularly, couples come to agreements with each other to decide who is going to manage their money, and this will determine who in the couple is in control, in power. They assess, from the very beginning, the financial gain of staying together and the economic consequences of a future separation.

Unfortunately, nobody can escape. Change has affected not only individuals but also families, neighborhoods, cities, provinces and nations; it is a phenomenon that embraces the whole planet. How communications and information flow and influence people are topics so deep that we will never be able to assess their magnitude. The truth is that no inhabitant is on the sidelines when it comes to what happens in our planet. Nothing has been solved efficiently in our world in the last decades: not hunger, not diseases, not global poverty. I use this term because “global” is something used to refer to economy, communications, the industry, yet we forget that we also have global evils that afflict the world, like environmental issues, weapons of mass destruction, food shortage, the concentration of wealth and the subjugation by the leading countries to the rest by means of the financial markets. The world is going through a globalized moral crisis.

It is very difficult to keep a balance in a field where our parents moved with values completely different to the ones shared by our children. Our grandparents travelled using wagons or carts, and our children drive cars at 125 miles per hour. People who are today 50 to 60 years old are true survivors. Those who were not killed by the war, were taken by AIDS, drugs or simply the fact of envisioning a different world. Nonetheless, we are responsible for the current situation —our parents may be at fault even more—; particularly, we have done quite little socially and much to help ourselves. Our parents communicated through letters that could take months to arrive to the recipient. Only a few decades ago, travelling from one continent to the other could take months. But, today, we can travel throughout the world easily and a continental flight of the longest kind could take only a few hours. Moreover, we communicate instantly by using satellite systems that adjust to a countless variety of formats. People are buying tour packages to travel to space and companies offer six-month journeys for those who want to be the first tourists to arrive in Planet Mars; a one-way ticket trip, of course. Master Silo would say: “heroes of this age range fly to the stars and to regions that were once ignored; they fly outwards and unaware of the fact that they are being driven to an inner and luminous core”, that is, the more we move away, the more we seek to find ourselves. Two opposing purposes contained within one reality.

Furthermore, previous generations build up relationships with codes that could last a lifetime. Our modern generation does not have the ability to sustain a bond in time; not a family, not a couple, not even a friendship. It has lost this capacity that can only be incorporated by learning. I think that, before this individualism, people lived happier.