[FRIAM] unrest in SoAm & Global ideological/sociopolitical/economic alignment...

[Steve Smith]

The general sentiment of the replies to this thread seems to be: "there 
is no reason to characterize anything like a 'golden age of Latin 
America' beyond perhaps the post WWII boom in economies participating in 
the rebuilding of Europe with a natural advantage to those who did not 
participate in receiving the destruction of that war.

I have tried to take this to heart and understand what I was trying to 
understand with the possibility (likelihood) that the idea of a "Golden 
Age of Latin America" is probably the superposition of several 
projections, some innocent, some perhaps not.   I also heard the tone 
that the paper I referenced might have an element of "blame the victim" 
suggesting that Latin America had somehow failed to manifest the destiny 
we imagined for them.   A significant element in the limited economic 
and political stability that has happened in "Latin America" during this 
period has been the (barely disguised) interference of major 
(super)powers around the world, in particular, the US, USSR and China 
(probably in that order of magnitude?).

An interesting comment spurred by an discussionon Researchgate 
<https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_1950s_a_golden_age_for_Latin_America> 
is inlined here:

    /I would understand the 1950s as some kind of "take-off" phase in
    state-building, economic development, education, etc., strengthened
    in the 1960s by on the one hand the Alliance for Progress, on the
    other by first attempts of import-substitution. In this view, the
    50s appear as a golden age because they were, in many parts of the
    continent, the first moment of political engagement with pressing
    issues. For the moment, that was great. Seen from today, not so
    much. I am thinking about the forced industrialization and
    indigenismo that were big in the 50s and can be critizised quite
    harshly now. - Philipp Altmann
    /

In the same spirit of Glen's recent (excellent) summary of the spectrum 
(and need to embrace and traverse it) from Concrete to Abstract:  I do 
believe that collective entities (such as (sub)cultures, peoples, 
countries, regions, etc) can be described across the same spectrum.   
Individuals (GaryS's indigenous neighbors) are probably mostly 
experiencing *very* concrete things (like when the garden you depend on 
for sustenance fails or stutters because of drought or flood or ???) 
while scholars (and politicians and private buttinskis like me) in the 
US or Europe (or even higher education *in* those regions) are smearing 
(by aggregation and statistical measures) and abstracting (with 
forced/adopted ontologies) the "burrs" away, leaving their observations 
and judgements likely to at best only obliquely relevant to what is 
"really going on".

Unfortunately, in the spirit of Harari's "intersubjective reality", as 
those who wield high-leverage power come to accept and believe and act 
on these "obliquely relevant" observations and judgements, then they 
become in some painful way an over-arching "reality" that effects the 
concrete reality of those trying to grow crops or prevent their homes 
from being burned down or washed away by natural processes (sometimes 
set akilter by the actions enjoined by the aforementioned out-of-touchers).

The current (continuing) battles between Lula de Silva and Bolsanaro 
(and their many faithful followers) as well as our own Left/Right 
Authoritarian/Liberal divides are fought in terms of these higher level 
"intersubjective realities" which are the antithesis of what our own 
politicians like to dub (dismissively or divisively?) "kitchen table" 
issues.

I just saw a recent set of reports on the Pegasus Phone-Hacking software 
which convinced me that such tools (that one in particular) are now a 
mainstream part of the global intelligence/security apparatus (and their 
shadows, however you find your way to aligning the "good guys" from the 
"bad guys", etc.   This may feel like a tangent, but the ability to tap 
directly into the global "nervous system" and monitor (and manipulate... 
see discussions here on chatGPT for example) individual (and therefore 
also collective) behaviours has risen significantly since my time in 
this business (trying to be righteous with it at the time) in the first 
decade of this century...

On 1/12/23 11:31 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> GaryS, et al  -
>
> I was recently trying to make a little more sense of the larger 
> sociopolitical situation across central/south America and realized 
> that your location in Ecuador might provide some useful parallax.
>
>     https://www.as-coa.org/articles/2023-elections-latin-america-preview
>
> I was (not?) surprised to read that there was a renewed interest in 
> "regional integration".    This article references Lula and Obrador 
> and several other Latin American leaders who might be attempting a 
> broader ideological (and economic) alignment/cooperation across the 
> region.
>
>     https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/will-lula-achieve-regional-integration-in-latin-america/
>
> With the unrest of the summer triggered? by energy/fossil-fuel prices 
> it seems like Ecuador has become (temporarily, modestly) unbalanced 
> which seems like an opportunity for change, whether for better or 
> worse.   I see in the first article (Elections Preview) that Lasso has 
> a very low approval rating and the upcoming (February) elections might 
> include/yield a recall for him?
>
> I lived on the border of AZ/MX as a teen in the early 70s and the 
> recent memory/residue of the Golden Age of Latin America was still 
> evident.  The Mexican border town (Agua Prieta) still had moderately 
> grand facilities and institutions (e.g.  A huge library with elaborate 
> fountains on the grounds, etc) even though they were not able to 
> support them in that grandeur... So I think I still have an ideation 
> that Latin America has many of the resources or (hidden) momentum to 
> achieve a resurgence of some sort.
>
> These reflections are partly triggered by this interview/article 
> produced by WBUR/Boston and distributed via NPR:
>
>     https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/01/11/8-billion-earth-population-rise-human
>
> Which reminded me that while we *do* have a total-population problem 
> with our 8B and rising numbers (and 90+ % of land animal by mass being 
> human or human domesticates), the *distribution* of people, and more 
> to the point the demographic fecundity/fertility distribution is very 
> uneven and in fact seems to be inversely proportional to various 
> features of human civilization ranging from GDP to education to 
> technological development.    Some (like DJT) turn this into a 
> judgement and a reason for resentment/fear (e.g. S*hole country 
> labels) but others have a more progressive view.   An excerpt from the 
> WBUR interview/article:
>
>     *Jennifer Sciubba: *"We're moving toward this aging and shrinking
>     world, and we are worried because we can't sustain that same huge
>     level of economic growth in the past. And we do need to think
>     about what that might look like, so we can look relook at concepts
>     like retirement. We can look at concepts like what is work life.
>     We also, though, have to start thinking about family and marriage.
>     And, you know, we're talking about a paradigmatic shift.
>
>     "That means we have to look at the world through a completely
>     different lens than we've looked at the world in the past. But all
>     of our theories about the good life, our economic theories, our
>     political theories, those were all developed under conditions of
>     population growth and economic growth, as William said. So it's
>     really hard to get a paradigmatic shift and say, what if we try to
>     look at the world in a different way? Can we look at an aging and
>     shrinking society as a good thing? Can we look at growing older
>     individually as a good thing? We've not been good at that. And so
>     we're kind of taking that negativity and applying it at the
>     societal level."
>
> This passage specifically references aging (individual and population) 
> but there are other references to economic/technological disparities.
>
> I also defer here to others who have an international POV (e.g. Pieter 
> in South Africa,  Sarbajit in India, Jochen in Germany, and I believe 
> we have someone from Cuba, I think we lost (off the list) Mohammed 
> from Egypt a few years ago, etc.) as well.    We are not a very 
> demographicly representative group here but still offer a somewhat 
> broad samplying by some measures.
>
> I realize this is yet another of my rambly maunderings but I'd be 
> curious to hear what others are observing/thinking about these issues 
> in this current time of global flux.
>
> - Steve
>
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoomhttps://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru presenthttps://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>    1/2003 thru 6/2021http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20230117/c4719591/attachment.html>