Sócrates, o verdadeiro

Society refuses to recognize its own mistakes and tries to, selectively, fit the facts on its own pre-cooked solution and thus falling for the same mistakes time after time. History repeats itself and we refuse to learn from it, false worshipping  ideologic gods with blind faith.

The culprits must be found and punished, but politicians from the last decades are also to blame for this.

The truth is that it was this society that let these people grow they way we saw these last days. It was not a riot politically motivated, it was not a riot for survival. It was a riot caused by the lack of values, lack of education, lack of hope in the future and consumerism.

There is no common profile, they are unemployed, employed, students. Some are people to whom society did not give the right incentives, for whom sometimes it’s better to have no job or only part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs (for their abilities) due to the way benefits are given. Others are people that, having a job, due to the cost of living in the city (where they can still find a  job) it’s not enough for them to have any hope of climbing the social ladder. Others are simply people that think they are entitled to receiving without giving anything in return.

Cutting their benefits is not the solution, it would only lead them to steal on a daily basis and even if they were caught and jailed, guess who would pay for their stay (us).

We must present people with the right incentives. We must not let people become addicted to inactivity, receiving money without giving something back. We must, given there are no jobs or possibility of creating them in the short term, ask for part-time community service in exchange for the benefits, so that people can value work and its returns (both monetary as well as in their communities). We must give people some meaning in life, teach them the value of discipline and respect, since they start attending kindergarten, through schools and then University (where we must make sure that no one, with ability to evolve there, is left out because they cannot afford it). We must educate parents and children, because only by doing so can we hope for a better future, one built with the help of all, one where people make use of Democracy to end social and economic injustice, one where people end the abuse of those that take society hostage through economic and social fear, taking resources vital to make better society.

We must forget all of above, go to the streets and observe.

People tend reduce them to mindless thugs, they are, but they are the mindless thugs that our society tolerated, that the enticed politicians and ideological professionals created through their ping-pong of theories, very well framed on what they thought is reality, in which dialectics is a stranger.

It’s time for those that run our countries to get their hands dirty, climb down their ivory towers and perfect theories and adopt agile processes, be true leaders of us all on the front-lines, learning and detecting problems before these become social debt with impossible interests.

Time for us to free Democracy.

London, 11th of August, 2011

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