TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
The matter that begins to think about is that of the harmful effects of the world tecno-mediático on the democracy. Now we go beyond the power massmediático in yes, to arrive to the position of an eventual incompatibility of the democratic values with the universal norms of the communication. If the man becomes a mere symbolic animal this political system it will have lost all rationality. Giovanni Sartori defines it as “the primacy of the image, that is to say, of the visible thing on the intelegible.”
The man that “he/she looks at the screen” he is becoming somebody that doesn't understand. The systems of measuring the call “public opinion” they are moving to a button of the tele-command and who presses that button it is somebody without capacity of abstract thought. That old old fogy called party politician depends now on forces that escape to the work of reception of members or the deep positions on government's projects. The surveys become more and more sophisticated and, at the same time, more erratic, but they are part of the destruction group of something that today is an entelechy and, nevertheless, it is continued calling “public opinion.”
The contendores of the democracy, in absolute terms, they have changed. The old enemies were demolished, but many new they have arisen, the populism, the new constitutional autocracies that seek protection in a State of falsified Right and built to the measure.
If the democracy is an opinion exercise, or “opinion government” according to the definition of Albert Dicey, the democracy is an empty shell, because as well Sartori observes it the opinions they are “you devise slight” that should not be proven. We have seen as the calls “you program of government” that before the applicants elaborated to the power they have fallen in total disuse, for the simple reason that they don't influence electorally. Coarse to manage two or three you question machacantes to define to that weakness variable call “public opinion.”
Now then, in this it was tecno-mediática the opinions they are not independent, they don't arise of the conglomerate, on the contrary, they come him imposed by the exercise massmediático. Numerous analysts have pointed out the disappearance of the sensitive thing, since the television erases the concepts and he makes of the man a receiver that you go without understanding. He explains to it the growing one and the politicians' indetenible ignorance. We have arrived to a rule massmediática: who appears conceptual it cannot win the elections.
When we speak of lack of ideas we don't refer to the thinkers. The European intellectuals, fundamentally, because it was in Europe where the democracy presented the first symptoms of flaws, they have been devoted to the topic from the decade of the 60, in a tradition that we believe they began the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio and the British Raymond William that extends until our days with Alain Finkielkraut. Of course that when Bobbio begins its analyses the massmediático he had not acquired the current development, however Italian smells it. He already saw come the world from the instant that has undergone the screen-eye, an instantaneidad unaware to the conscience.
That that yes it is in interdict from distant decades it is the concept of “public opinion”, the fallacy that wraps it when not being another thing that an induction, and the same representativeness. A term put on in fashion to point out an advance ideal, the call “democracy participativa” that seems to be something like that like an approximate search of direct democracy. To they were added it the Parliament's obvious crises, of the same elections and, to my to understand the most serious in all the crises, the politics's exercise conditioned by the power tecno-mediático.
It is not, because, thinkers' lack being in charge of of the topic. Where there are not ideas it is in the rulers, in those governed, in the politicians and in the fractional masses and anarquizadas for the effect massmediático. The absolute victory of the democracy, proclaimed to the fall of the wall of Berlin, it has become in a crisis of high risk where all the concepts are being subjected to revision and where the traditional institutions seem to collapse. In Europe he/she can feel more the effect of the globalization, to the internal thing, because the experience of the external unit continues ahead in spite of the logical trips, being, in fact that integration, the most successful experiment begun by the man in this field, a handle that impedes the profundización of the crisis.
In the Latin American countries it is the politics the one that disappears and without her there is not social structure able to generate directing and less government. The same conception of what is, or it should be, a democratic government low question is and, I never eat, a wave of populism proclaims to the majorities irredentas with the right of governing exercising kind of a new autocracy of the majorities. The problem of the politics's exercise is also a cultural problem: the educational systems seem to have failed boisterously and the towns are shown more and more ignorant. The screen-eye full with stereotypes, makes of the decision, or of the simple political participation, an act without ideas. The politicians, more and more mediocre and clumsier, surrender in the face of the power massmediático and they make of the politics a banal sultry performance.
Everything takes us to the concepts of power and of State. It is obvious the crisis of the State-nation, like it obviates the certainty that a new form of power is appearing, still in the nebulas of the imprecisión, but fundamentally different to that that up to now have understood for such. We should say that the industrial era finished, to which associates the traditional idea of democracy, and that we are in other, the massmediática whose impositions, obviously, they are tearing to the same democracy. The insurgir of the defense of the human rights has been good to limit the totalitarian buds that are shown as a bad symptom, but the crisis of the social State it has put in evidence an unjust economy that has become a factory of poor in the dependent countries.
To the thinkers of the political thing we read them some few ones, some few ones are watchful on the wrongs that hang on the democracy, some can write in the newspapers on these topics, other not, but certainly the thought of the political philosophy has not influenced in anything in the behavior simiesco of the politicians and of all that depends on them. We can recognize that the thought is slow, but also that he doesn't have the power of the massmedias that converts everything in instantaneous, in intrascendente, in banal, including the main thing, government's form. Mainly they don't resemble the ideologies that were equal to stones inmodificables or closed systems, rather he largely resembles a growing incultura that has taken possession of the societies, for the effect of the screen embrutecedora.
The scarce influence of the thought on the democracy in the same democracy is due to the crisis of all transcendent thought in a world of messes, of insubstancialidad and to that diagnoses in way different to like the demolished ideologies were built. It is not a plane that possessor of the truth is proclaimed neither seek to proclaim the solution of the man's problems.
It is a group of diagnostic and of warnings. The middle classes, key actors in all political action, are only mobilized when their rights are threatened, they are stupid and anarchical classes that convert an assembly of neighbors in kind of a meeting of condominium of their building. They are the middle classes the example of functional inaction induced by the screen-eye or the instrument manipulable for the particular interests disguised of collective.
