On War and Blindness
23
Feb
It is always blind or just egocentric that inability to look at the Other,
they want your attention just to demand their gifts and accomplishments, so they are egocentric, but social and cultural blindness is broader, in it lies the inability to accept different cultures and peoples, they say they do not constitute a relevant group or do not have an advanced culture, where the issue of advancement depends only on the referential, the most common in both cases is to claim the other’s gaze on themselves, without there being reciprocal.
The essay on blindness by José Saramago, which we have already posted here, talks about this social blindness seen as a virus that spreads and begins to blind everyone, and which was turned into a film by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, with a screenplay by Don McKellar, and we call it our post-essay of Intermittencies of Death, another essay by Saramago.
Camus also described in his novel The Plague, about a disease that hit his native country (he was Algerian) and that saw that there comes a time when the truth seems to offend everyone, even the once sensible: “but there comes a time in the story in which anyone who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death” because it is “an idea that may make you laugh, but the only way to fight the plague is honesty”, this forgotten and even ironic virtue nowadays.
Camus says that overcoming fear and pain “I understood that all the misfortune of men came from not having a clear language. So I decided to speak and act clearly, to put myself on the right path”, this implies not only wisdom and courage, but also overcoming human blindness.
In a more forceful passage the author will say: “Men are more good than bad, and in fact that is not the point. But they are more or less ignorant, and this is what is called virtue or vice, the most desperate vice being that of ignorance, which thinks it knows everything and then authorizes itself to kill”, but then there is hatred and war.
This seems to be a path of no return that we are walking, not just on the lit fuse in Ukraine and Russia, but in all humanity, the blindness of the time of the wars seems to have returned in full and everyone is pointing the finger at each other, and Karl Klaus warned journalists who were also riding the wave: “War, at first, is the hope that we will get along well; then there is the expectation that the other will get screwed; then, the satisfaction of seeing that the other did not do well; and finally, the surprise of seeing that everyone was screwed.
The Bible also does not lack this metaphor: the blind Bartimaeus who begs for sight, for the healing of the man born blind (incredible because he did not have a cognitive system to see) and went to wash himself in the pool of Siloam and the two blind men of Galilee, is It is clear to most theologians that this cure is to see the truth that men refuse to see: Love and Peace.
The regional and national polarizations are gradually becoming global and the feeling that the other is going to “get screwed” is the growing and pure blindness, we will all get screwed.
