A democracy of ignorant people cannot work: Fernando Savater

“A democracy of ignorant people cannot function. Democracy has to educate in self-defense, because the danger against democracy is the ignorant and their weight within society”.

The philosopher and writer Fernando savater It is located in the city of Oaxaca. This Sunday will be in charge of closing the program of activities of the 42nd edition of the Oaxaca International Book Fair (FILO) and will take the opportunity to present his book “Solo integral: A turn of the screw to his best ideas” (Ariel 2022).

But, prior to his presentation, this Friday Savater offered a press conference to talk about education, pandemic, institutions, metaverses and political correctness.

Educating, he said, is indispensable in the post-pandemic, pre-pandemic era and during the pandemic. “That is, there are no times without pandemics. The covid It is not the first pandemic, nor is it the most serious, nor will it be the last. That has nothing to do with educating or not educating. You have to educate for the times in which you live. If the season is healthy, it is necessary to educate for health, and if the season has a hygienic problem, it is necessary to educate for that. The problem is (to know) what education we choose for human beings who are free, capable, responsible. We educate so that people live in a socially egalitarian world”.

In this context, the philosopher highlighted the importance of the initiatives of civic groups, whose action, he urged, should be more transcendental than the repercussions of the action of public institutions. “You don’t always have to wait to see what they order to do, but there are things that civic groups have to do outside of what is working institutionally. If we see that the institutional and the official do not defend these values, let us try to form other groups that defend them until they end up succeeding socially”.

Education, he added, always has to be elitist, but not as it is currently understood. “The idea that education is simply to keep people down is naïve. What education wants is for everyone to be part of the elite and not just a few. Education does not seek equalization from below, that everyone is ignorant or populist, but education seeks that everyone knows the aristocracy of thought and freedom. Therefore, to educate is to educate princes, always. We educate so that people are princes, but not a few, but all; that is the difference with the education that seeks to praise the people and say ‘how beautiful the people is’, so that it always remains a slave of the princes”

In this sense, he indicated that free beings never ask “what is going to happen” but rather “what are we going to do”. “The question is not what is going to happen to Mexico but what are we going to do. The future of societies is what societies do with them. If we don’t do something to prevent bad things, bad things will happen (…) justice, legality, institutions are not perfect, but they are better than their opposites, so civilized people fight for what they consider to be imperfect but better than other things and can be improved over time”.

Likewise, he referred to the vision of those politicians who express ideas such as that societies should be like loving families, the philosopher declared: “many of those who say that society is a great family is because they pretend that they are the head of society ( …) is a self-delusion for those who believe that they are looking for a universal family and what they should do is look for an egalitarian society”.

Other opinions of Savater

Among other questions from the press, Fernando Savater considered that the idea of ​​the metaverse “is one of those things that millionaires invent from time to time and there are people who take it as if it were true. That is, there have been many metaverses. I don’t know what that is, it doesn’t interest me, I know what human beings are, what their problems are, and then their problems are not metaversic but real. We are going to worry about real life and not about what the glamorous magazines are saying at the moment about what reality is, because it has little to do with the truth.

He indicated that “currently there is a tendency, instead of solving problems, to solve the language in which we refer to them. Periphrastic formulas are sought to refer to things, then, of course, things are not resolved with that. I can say that I have an alternative view, but the truth is that I am myopic, and that is why I have to wear glasses. So it is absurd to look for a non-offensive formula. It is not about looking for periphrases to sweeten our appearance, our limitations, but to find remedies for the real problems that people who are not verbal have. But in our time there is that kind of not calling things by their name and so maybe they stop being what they are, and I think that’s a mistake.