CONTRA TYRANNOS
(Rodrigo A. de Souza Peñaloza, August 10th, 2023)
We must never remove from the public debate our perennial vigilance against the perils of the divinization of states and rulers. What you are about to read, if you are kind enough to be patient, is something I wrote some years ago about Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s tyrant, and the death of Óscar Pérez. Hic et nunc, to our tristesse, these same thoughts apply to Brazil almost entirely, so I had to add Brazil to the text. As I wrote then, I could have Indonesia in mind and its legal say on the death of people, or, as I write now, Brazil and its abusive Supreme Court with its iconic taste for debochery against free speech, but also, once again as I wrote before, Hugo Chávez, who conspurcated the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity advanced by Simón Bolivar in the construction of a just and perfect society. Bolívar, a man of value, honored his oath. Chávez, a traitor equaled only by Jubelus, not only did not, he also handed Venezuela to this coward Stalin-like tyrant called Nicolás Maduro, to whom President Lula, in his “relative democracy”, devotes the most surreal admiration.
Back in January 2018, I thought that the murder of Óscar Pérez, a death sentence decided by Maduro himself, would then trigger the end of Maduro’s tyranny. It seemed to be inevitable. How many lives, however, should still be spared for Venezuela to be free from the worst mental disease that has always kneeled Latin America down at the door of Progress: self-pity in search of divine saviors? How long will it take for us Latin Americans not to be affraid of Liberty and the responsibilities that come with it? Hic et nunc, in Terra Brasilis, how many more journalists should still be silenced by a Supreme Court that seems to be nothing else than the Praetorian Guard of a reelected Thief?
Deep within, in the imperscrutable holds of our spiritual reminiscences, lie the wreckages of our ancestral struggle against the only pair of forces that crush us from outside in: the destructive force of Nature and the destructive force of Man.
We unfolded Science only to cope with the former or at least to outlive her assaults and make the most out of her for the sake of the common good. We have nevertheless not been capable of rightly making sense of the things we have done to overbear the destructive force of Man. I allude specifically to the battles we have engaged in against tyranny in favour of Right, Justice, and Truth.
The lives of many women and men of value, mowed off by the cold steel of the jacobine blade, reaped either by the ostensive religious fanaticism of Torquemadas and Alexandres de Morais or by the brute force of political dictatorships, were willingly sacrificed throughout the modern era on behalf of the greater idea that the Natural Right of Man antecedes the Positive Right of Nation. This is our fundamental fight in the civil field. Cave canem: if you speak, you might be arrested.
We fight tyranny because we understand that the State, in its role of organizing and regulating the relations within the civil community and the participation of it in the law of nations, must not, in spite of all, be ascribed the divine power that must be ascribed only to Nature herself. Life is a concession of Nature, hence divine. Life is a Natural Right and it is not up to the State to dispose of it at will. So is Liberty. It is not true that the State may or must enforce its decisions, even if agreed upon by the consensual will of its own citizens, since the limits of the Positive Right are to be determined by the Natural Rights, which, diffuse as they may be, are nevertheless natural and consonant with the dictates of Reason. Furthermore, there is something people use to call “Constitution”.
Our fellow idealists of the past moulded the concept of Civilization of which, on the one hand, we are proud of, and against which, on the other, we throw the stones of our own intellectual incoherence. Civilization is nothing else than the principle that the State is not divine. What is tyranny if not a divinized State? If we accept the divinization of the State, we hand over to it the right to dispose of human life just like Nature disposes of the life of beings. We subdue ourselves to the tirant by choosing fear over freedom, so taught us Étienne de la Boétie in his Discours de la Servitude Volontaire. Our fight has put the State down to its right place, the realm of human institutions, and subjected it to the Natural Right, as was beautifully made binding by the men who conceived of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America when they wrote, on the steps of talented thinkers from Socrates to Adam Smith to John Locke: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
The submission we owe to the laws of the country does not impede us from appraising, with the tools of Reason we are perennially urged to use, its moral value and its correspondence to the higher principles we defend. It is our natural and constitutional right to freely express our concerns about governmental mistakes and abuses. Therefore, for the man who considers himself a true citizen of the Western Civilization, it is definitively not coherent to accept that the State enforce its decisions by massacring constitutional and natural rights, under the veiled pressupposition that the State can arrest and persecute anyone it wishes provided it earns the applause of corrupt politicians and a hypocritical press, as if these decisions should not, from the very beginning, comply with the principle that “the State shall not be divine”! For the true citizen of the Western Civilization, it is not coherent to approve of death penalty levied by the State on the criminal, and then joke on such despicable death by saying that criminals know what they do anyway, and that “good criminal is dead criminal”, forgetting, as it seems, that denying the divine character of the State is our most fundamental principle of Democracy. There is absolutely no difference, however, between the horror of the tyrannt’s power over the life and death of citizens and the horror of that same tyrant’s power over the incarceration or freedom of his political enemies without due process, as it is the case nowadays in Brazil under the rhetorical use of the diffuse term “antidemocratical acts”, a dangerous weapon in the hands of a biased Supreme Court and irresponsible politicians.
Liberalism is not just the idea of Liberty, it is the idea of Liberty as a Natural Right, and this seems to be something that many self-declared “democrats” simply do not understand, let alone influential Latin American thinkers.
The State does not give Life, hence it cannot take it back. It is given to us by Nature and only Nature can claim it back. The State cannot constraint our freedom of speech. It is the verbalization of our individual consciousness, our divine essence, and such right is given to us by God. We have to be coherent with the principles we spoused and not cede to the inquisitorial persecutions exerted by those in power who, however blinded they might be by the obscure veil of ideological vengeance, become the progenitors of a tyrannical government.
This is our most precious Natural Right, equaled only to our Natural Right to Life and the pursue of Happiness: to speak against the destructive force of Man manifested in the divinized State.
