Thanks Navigator. Here's my translation for everyone to read. I will comment later.
________________________________________________________________________
Javier Milei: Freedom Moves Forward, Everything Else Moves Backward
The presidential elections in Argentina left a large part of the world speechless. A man with no career in politics and with quite radical ideological positions has just been elected president. The following article is an attempt to reflect on the recent phenomenon and perhaps, why not, make some sense of it.
Let's start with the most tedious part so we can quickly get to the most interesting part.
Who is Milei?
Javier Milei is a 53-year-old Argentine economist who gained public notoriety in the 2016 political campaign that ended with Mauricio Macri becoming president. Since then and increasingly his popularity has increased from his participation in public forums and journalistic programs.
But it was in 2019 when the economist finally burst onto the country's political scene when he made official his affiliation to the Libertarian Party and was almost immediately named honorary president of the movement.
From that moment on, his public appearances were amplified and, together with them, the sympathies and adhesions to his political platform by an increasingly important sector of the population grew. It is worth clarifying that most of the political sympathies captured during this period came from citizens who carried a heavy burden of frustration and anger due to the constant deterioration of their living conditions after many years of corrupt and incompetent governments that invested more time and energy in consolidating their power than in serving the people.
Of all this period, the four years of Mauricio Macri (2016-2020), who not only did not fulfill his promises but aggravated the crisis the country was suffering, and the following four years of Alberto Fernandez (2020 to date) who promised to put the country on track and did nothing but worsen what was already bad enough.
In that scenario of uneasiness, frustration and anger, the figure of Milei appears, who exudes a certain degree of authenticity in his person thanks to his explosive character marked by bad manners, shouting and insults to anyone who opposed his opinion and a particular way of expressing his ideas as absolute and unquestionable truths.
Many Argentines felt at that time that this guy represented them, represented their anger and all the pent-up rage they felt against a petty and ineffective political class that was more concerned with their personal agendas than with bringing prosperity and development to their country.
Thus, Javier Milei's political capital grew under the protection of the law of the anti-something. He won the sympathy of the anti-Peronists, the anti-politicians and even the anti-State, a group formed by all those who mistakenly identify the State Institution and politicians as if they were one and the same thing.
And I say wrongly because, although those who administer the State are politicians, the two are not the same thing. The State is an abstract institution whose benevolence or maledictiveness will depend fundamentally on those who are in charge of its administration, while politicians are simply people. Unfortunately, most of those who reach the most notorious positions are the most ambitious and morally handicapped. Consequently, bad politicians create failed states, but that does not mean that the state is bad per se and should be eliminated from the equation. In the following section it will be better understood why I bring this topic up.
The ideas that inspire Milei
Javier Milei defines himself in philosophical terms as an anarcho-capitalist and in practical or real terms as a minarchist.
The former is a political philosophy that considers the State to be something like a cancer of society and that its reason for existing is to curtail the freedoms of citizens. For anarcho-capitalists the ideal world would be a world without a state where everything is resolved in the realm of private interaction based on consensual agreements.
The second, minarchy, is a moderate view of the above, where anarcho-capitalists admit almost in rebellion that there should be a very small version of the State whose only functions should be to provide its citizens with police, military and courts, to protect the citizenry from aggression and theft, and to enforce property laws, i.e. a State that in practical terms does not participate in the development of society or concern itself with guaranteeing rights other than property rights.
It is from these ideas that Milei builds his political project to change Argentina.
Milei's thinking
To understand how Javier Milei thinks, let's explore some of the ideas he openly exposed in his media raid of the last few years.
"La libertad avanza" is the name of the political party founded by Milei. The choice of the name is not accidental. For Milei the primary value (almost the only one I would say) that must be defended to the last consequences is freedom. Who could disagree with this? I guess nobody, but the point here is that we are not paying attention to the fine print of the social contract he invites us to sign.
Freedom is undoubtedly a fundamental value in a healthy society, but not in an abstract vacuum where there are no other equally important values or the context that reality provides. Freedom must be defended and preached together with equality before the law and equal opportunities, justice, respect and recognition of the dignity of others, and also, why not, human values such as solidarity and empathy. It is the development of all these values together that helps to build a healthy and prosperous society.
But what happens when freedom is stripped of all context? What happens when an attempt is made to implant this ideal in society without considering the existence of other values of equal importance?
Freedom, as well as other values, are empty ideas when deprived of context. Think, for example, of Milei's ideas on the free sale of organs. According to his perspective, if I wanted to sell a kidney, why should the state prohibit me from doing so? Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? After all, it is my body, my decision. Now imagine this same thing in a real scenario where there are very poor people who can barely feed their families and very wealthy people who eventually suffer a disease that leads them to put their survival at risk unless they receive an organ from a donor. The organ market that would be created from this situation would be a perverse one, where only the rich would have a chance of survival and the poor would be sentenced to sell themselves to pieces in order to survive.
Let alone if a poor person has the misfortune of falling ill and needs an organ to survive, he or she would literally be sentenced to death because of the impossibility of buying one. Add to this the possibility that, given the demand for organs by people with fewer resources, a black market for organs could be created where they could be obtained more cheaply at the expense of these organs being obtained by criminal networks. Sounds like a dystopian movie, doesn't it? Well, all this is perfectly acceptable for an anarcho-capitalist, the market together with the law of supply and demand should set the course of society. If someone cannot afford an organ, then let him die, ultimately, within the logic of this philosophical current, it would be his fault for not having procured the necessary resources to be able to face that adversity.
Is it understood how an apparently virtuous idea such as freedom can become a hell of perversity when it is taken to absurd extremes and deprived of context?
The same happens with the sale of children. Javier Milei believes (and he said this in front of the camera making the caveat that it was a philosophical discussion and recognizing that it was not a debate to install in Argentina at this moment) that there should be no inconvenience in legalizing the sale of children, after all, according to the anarcho-capitalists, today the State has the monopoly of this "market" through the adoption system.
I assure you that in the mental simulator that Milei has in his head everything sounds reasonable: children are the property of the parents, so if two adults arrange a transaction by mutual agreement, why should the State prevent it? Children are simple exchangeable goods, in fact EVERYTHING is an exchangeable good for an anarcho-capitalist and EVERYTHING is legal as long as there is an agreement between parties.
Now let's take this idea out of Milei's mental simulator and put it into reality. Wouldn't it be possible (even very likely) that pedophiles with a good economic status start buying children to satisfy their dark and perverse desires? If there are no agencies outside the commercial sphere to intervene in the process, there will be no mechanisms to prove the suitability and good intentions of the future parents and everything will remain under the "protection" of the all-powerful hand of the market and the free agreements between parties.
Is it possible to see how a virtuous ideal stripped of context leads to sickening situations that any decent human being would find repugnant?
Do you want more absurdities? For Javier Milei Al Capone is a hero, an object almost of adoration, a role model, someone he deeply admires. Why? Because during Prohibition in the USA this "noble" guy saw a business opportunity and he took advantage of it. A real entrepreneur, that Capone! Supply and demand, that's all. This criminal is the model entrepreneur that Milei values. It doesn't matter if he murdered more than 200 people (that's estimated) or that anyone who wanted to enter his business niche was brutally exterminated at machine gun point (I wonder where free competition went).
In fact, Milei believes he was a hero in his day because he defied an abusive state policy (dry law) and saved a large number of jobs by allowing liquor to continue to circulate despite restrictions that, without this "holy man's" intervention, would have caused unemployment and winery closures. According to Milei, Al Capone made use of his freedom to operate in the market by satisfying a demand and was a victim of the evil State that tried to ruin his business. It doesn't matter if the mobster extended his business to gambling, prostitution, bribery, narcotics, robbery, "protection" business and murder on demand, all this is irrelevant because for Javier Milei only freedom matters. How all this affects the social fabric is a trifle unimportant for the Argentine economist.
I could go on and on about Milei's views on drug legalization and other equally controversial issues, but I think you get the point by now.
Disconnection from reality
Let's reflect a little. Ideas or ideals cannot exist in a vacuum without context. It is objective reality that gives sense and meaning to ideas, it is context that determines whether an idea is bad or good, to what extent it harms or benefits. Any one of us could affirm that killing is bad. Now, if it is a criminal who is threatening the life of our young son, self-defense would justify going to the extreme of killing and no one could say that this is wrong.
Milei is incapable of connecting ideas to reality because he is simply not connected to reality and therefore not connected to the rest of the human race. He does not seem to feel emotions like you or me, in fact he seems incapable of feeling empathy or experiencing pain just by imagining the suffering of others. This can be seen in each and every one of his public appearances.
Every time one sees Javier Milei speak it is as if one were looking at an empty talking carcass, a thing that has human form but lacks everything that defines us as humans. It seems to have enough intellectual ability to construct syllogisms and link them with some logic, but nothing more. No higher human emotions such as empathy or compassion are observed. On the contrary, we do see the continuous eruption of emotions that one could call inferior, visceral, instinctive or primitive: explosive rage, pathological fear, paranoia, uncontrolled contempt and anger towards those who think differently.... In short, all those emotions that a normal human being would try to fight within himself, he externalizes them without shyness and I would even say with a certain pride.
Nor is it that one perceives a vocation of service or a genuine intention to improve the lives of all citizens. Rather, what can be deduced from his interventions is that he is a subject pathologically convinced that he is right (he has no doubts, he does not accept other opinions) and willing to carry to the last consequences his "mission" of transporting his nuanced vision of reality to the real world.
On the other hand, behind his great ideas to change Argentina, there seems to be a kind of thirst for revenge, a violent anger directed at a sector of the population that, from his twisted point of view, is responsible for ruining the country for having voted for years for his ideological rivals. It seems that Milei intends to govern by rewarding all those who follow him and severely punishing all those who do not.
In his explosive speeches he was never heard to say anything that denotes a certain understanding of human tragedy, to show a minimum understanding of complex social dynamics or to give any indication of understanding the inequities and injustices to which some people are subjected. None of this is part of the equation he will use to govern.
The impression one gets all the time is that Javier Milei thinks but does not feel. He has the ability to construct seemingly rational arguments, but he is unable to connect emotionally with the human aspect of politics and to understand how putting certain ideas into practice affects society.
I don't care what you do with your life!
A group of individuals, for example the inhabitants of a country, make up a society, but a society cannot be defined only as the sum of the individuals that make it up. It is not possible to understand the effects that a given event or situation would have on a society simply by looking at the effects it would have on a single individual.
When people make up a society, they change, adapt, assume responsibilities, respect norms, undertake collective actions, practice rituals, adhere to customs, establish bonds of sympathy and antipathy with other groups or individuals.... In short, individuals in society establish links that to a certain extent tie their destiny to that of others.
All this forms a complex web of interactions and influences between individuals from which it is not possible to escape unless one, in the best Robinson Crusoe style, completely isolates oneself from the group for a very long period of time.
It is naïve to think that what happens to some individuals within a society will not affect others. The ways in which this happens may be very obvious or may be extremely subtle, but the reality is that each and every individual within a social fabric is in some way affected.
Libertarian currents, especially the more radicalized ones such as anarcho-capitalism, do not understand this basic premise. In their mental simulations they imagine individuals or groups of individuals acting to shape their destiny without altering the destiny of the rest of society.
That is why legalizing the sale of drugs is acceptable and even something to encourage for them. If two individuals get together, one wants to sell and the other wants to buy, what can be wrong with them doing business with each other? Surely the individual who takes drugs will deteriorate his health and eventually may even die, but why should we get involved in this matter, after all, it was his decision.
This segmented and individualistic view of human interactions seems very reasonable, but I think there are many questions we should answer before accepting so lightly these premises.
What happens to a society that normalizes the fact that some people become very rich at the expense of others? Wouldn't the moral and ethical foundations of that society crack? Wouldn't accepting this open the door to accept and normalize even more repudiatory things? Isn't it naive to think that none of this can affect us? What would happen if one day a dealer were at the door of the school your child attends, legally selling drugs to him and his friends?
There are many more questions to ask ourselves about this, but this exercise has no relevance for people like Javier Milei. The only thing that matters to them is that individuals act freely without the "sterile" limitations of the vile State.
Sincerity or sincerity?
Let's start by saying that Milei is not a politician, or at any rate he was not until he started his career as such as of 2019. The point is that he is not a career politician, one of those who has spent a good part of his life moving in that field and even living thanks to it.
We are used to conventional politicians and the reality is that those who ascend to the highest strata of politics are usually (pardon the generalization) quite scoundrels. None of them would hesitate to tell a lie or to hide their true intentions and/or ambitions. They tend to be unscrupulous and not very given to the vocation of being public servants.
Now why do you think these guys lie to the people? They do it because deep down they have the ability to distinguish between what a normal citizen would consider good or bad. These subjects are not completely bereft of conscience, something, however residual, allows them to have a basic understanding of right and wrong.
That said, I must say that when I listen to Milei speak I see sincerity in his words. And I understand that this may seem like a breeze of fresh air in the midst of so much quagmire, but let me explain why for me this detracts much more from Javier Milei than it adds to him.
Under normal conditions, listening to a politician speaking sincerely could make us feel that we are in the presence of a virtuous man. The problem is that in the particular case of Milei, his sincerity is the crude proof that we are in front of an insane mind or one devoid of the slightest vestiges of conscience.
Milei speaks fluently about creating a market for organs, about the feasibility of creating one also for children, about legalizing the sale of drugs, about how heroic Al Capone was, about how much progress privatizing the streets would bring (yes, he said enthusiastically, if you want to visit your mother or go to the supermarket you will have to map out the best route to make it as economical as possible, if you want to visit your mother or go to the supermarket you will have to map out the best route to make it as economical as possible), that children's literacy should be optional, that if an insulin-dependent diabetic can't get his insulin then tough luck for him, etc., etc., etc., etc., and etc. When he says all these things he is not afraid of public condemnation or of being seen as an insensitive beast, but not because he is very brave, but because he is incapable of understanding that for a significant number of people most of these barbarities are repudiatory.
It is disturbing that this man cannot distinguish between good and evil, nor can he differentiate between what the rest of the people consider good and bad. This suggests that we are in front of a flat, empty mind, without human essence, so to speak. Milei is, in my humble opinion, a psychiatric patient, one of those who should be isolated in a solitary wing of a hospital because he is extremely dangerous.
And how is it that he won the elections then?
It is worrying that a guy with serious problems to connect with the rest of the human race has acceded to the presidency of the country, but it is even more worrying that almost 56% of Argentines believed that this guy, who has been walking all over the media spreading his insane ideas for the last year, was a better choice than his opponent. Yes, I know, Sergio Massa, his opponent, is the typical political cockroach, a very bad choice, but at least he is relatively sane and has a basic understanding of the red lines he cannot cross without the country blowing up in his face.
To be honest, I can barely comprehend what has just happened. In my thoughts I am still debating between different hypotheses and I have several ideas fluttering around. Is this result simply an expression of anger and disappointment of the Argentine people towards an ignoble and greedy political class? Is what happened evidence that, after years of feeding social polarization and the radicalization of ideological positions, the threshold of rationality was crossed and a good part of society started to act in an instinctive and visceral way? What happened in Argentine society so that a good part of the population decided to ignore each and every one of the warning signs, to ignore the unhealthy ideas, the outbursts of madness, the manifestations of hatred and the abominable behavior of Milei and believed that despite all this, it was a good idea to seat him in the presidential chair and hope that he would give the country a prosperous future? Is this blindness temporary or does it constitute a permanent damage?
Anyway, I have many questions and few answers at the moment. I suppose the passage of time and events will help to answer them.
