Theory 1
The Theory of Induced Demoralization
DESDE LA IZQUIERDA
The Theory of Induced Demoralization
Combating induced demoralization in no way means suspending criticism. Quite the contrary. It implies the exercise of responsible and well-founded criticism, which safeguards unity and does not make it easy for the enemy to destroy us. Demoralized we are nothing
Author: Fernando Buen Abad | internet@granma.cu
December 20, 2020 20:12:21
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
It has always been known that one way (among many combined and unequal) to defeat an enemy or opponent, lies in making them lose everything that they could have trusted with respect to victory. To take away their certainty, dignity and skills by convincing them (before, during or after the battle) of their insolvency, smallness, complexes and inferiority: and then to demoralize them.
And, for this purpose, a thousand ways of precipitating the opponent’s defeat have been and are being studied. These range from the most daily and apparently inconsequential mockery, scorn, and slander… to the most sophisticated attacks, verbal or symbolic, trained in psychological warfare laboratories. Here morality is understood as Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez understood it.
Under capitalism, the repertoire of “conflict” is very varied, although at its base is the substantial monopolistic mania of those who want to eliminate from the scene all competition that complicates the dictatorship of prices. But on a larger scale, the mother of all struggles is the class struggle, and from it – and for it – all forms of open or disguised combat are lavished. These are capable of assuring a “triumph” which, besides imposing economic hegemony on the slave, is, at the same time, profitable. And they don’t care if that turns out to be a monumental setback or disaster for humanity.
Their golden dream would be that, in the dynamics of the struggle, the oppressors could save on weapons and soldiers, economize in every way possible, and make the enemy defeat itself (the product of deception, ideological manipulation, hatred of their peers …) and, in addition –not so random– make a profit from it. It would be an apotheosis, no matter if with it the most obscene behaviors and the most degrading anti-values are deployed. Like war.
To disarm the enemy before they know it, to make them believe that they are fighting bravely, and then to prove to them that they are powerless to bring them to their knees and that, moreover, they are grateful…, that they agree with their oppressor and makes defeat an “honorable” inheritance for their offspring. In schools or theories of war, the importance of striking the enemy until they lose all momentum is stressed, but, as in not a few cases, the loss of momentum is not synonymous with the abandonment of resistance. Capitalism, in its imperial phase, intends that the people, demoralized, also serve as an agent of combat against their own class. That is what the “media” serve for, which, in reality, are weapons of ideological warfare. Today they are bastions of the most ambitious invasion dream, which consists in dominating the capacity for ubiquity and speed. Like the “news agencies”, which in reality are factories of political fallacies and lynchings.
In addition to all the repertoires of gestures, grunts, and intimidating screams, demoralizing stratagems resort to many of the aesthetic strongholds of their cultural industries. Like advertising agencies. They say that “what is beautiful sells,” and for their purposes of demoralizing warmongering they invent, for example, discriminatory beauties that demoralize those who do not have attributes similar to the bourgeois stereotype. The warmongering of “luxury” is not a naive way of displaying temptations or fetishes of the rich… it is demoralizing shrapnel that strikes at the self-esteem of the dispossessed who, because they are dispossessed, feel nothing.
The bourgeois idea that “all is fair in war”, is nothing more than the legitimization of an ethical deformation in the service of the scoundrel. When the peoples struggle they do not repeat the logic of the oppressors nor do they reproduce their combat values. Mainly because they are not fighting for business. Although the bourgeoisie wants to convince us of its methods of struggle, they are the same ones that “anyone would use” if the conditions were met. The truth is that the Moral of Battle in the hands of the peoples is based on humanist and social justice objectives. Simply because we are not the same in the most rigorous class sense.
They, the oligarchs, maintain their fighting morality based on profit and the class hatred they learned to cultivate centuries ago. They feed their class contempt, knowing that “the other” is their historical enemy, that they constitute a majority and that, at any moment, their strength consciousness rises, by organizing themselves. And to prevent their rise, they spur on a crisis of revolutionary leadership in which the desire and the forces of struggle dissipate, at any price. For them, it is an investment.
To save ourselves as a species, and to save the planet, we need to consolidate our class consciousness and our symbolic forces, framed by a revolutionary and humanist program of a new kind. It must be capable of shattering every demoralizing strategy and deepening the bastions of our morality and not theirs. When a set of principles is consciously assumed (which are deepened and perfected in the crucible of praxis) nothing can break emancipatory morality.
For example, 1. The worker is not to be exploited. Private property is obscene in a world of the dispossessed. 3. The earth belongs to the one who works it. 4. It is forbidden to manipulate the education, consciousness and state of mind of the people. 5. True victories are an engine of invincible consciousness and morality. They are a heritage that admits no boundaries and that nestle in the hearts of the people. Not one step back. Not one neglected space. No surrender.
Fighting induced demoralization in no way means suspending criticism. Quite the contrary. It implies the exercise of responsible and well-founded criticism, which safeguards unity and does not make it easy for the enemy to destroy us. Demoralized we are nothing. In any case, the conviction that we must rescue the human species and the planet from the most predatory and criminal economic system in history is its very source. There is the joy of saving people’s joy, the love for love in all its expressions, the importance of social justice and the good life for all. There is the struggle of great people, of the indispensable, which is always social and always historical. There is a future that is possible and urgent without masters, without fear, without social classes, and without bitterness. There is the example inherited by the peoples and their victorious fights, antidotes, all of them magnificent, which, cultivated collectively, are the certainty of good life.