Herakles and his 13th task

By Dalia Céspedes

HAVANA – Herakles, that Hellenic hero whom the Romans and Disney called Hercules, performed 12 extremely difficult tasks before he was poisoned by his wife. If the hero returned today, he might want to deal with one of our most typical problems: to bridge the gap between social conscience and the judiciary, or between the culture of responsibility and the culture of control.

I said bridge the gap when I should have said fill it. It’s obvious that the first solution that comes to an intelligent mind is education. Education should always be the bridge, entertaining and accurate, between our animal desires and the evolutional needs of the species. That’s because (though nobody taught this to you in school) ours is a species still in the process of evolution, a species that has not yet achieved its best expression in the universe.

It seems obvious today that education is not enough to complete the ever-lengthening distance that remains between collective conscience and individual desires, i.e., that accumulation of individual desires that does not necessarily generate a collective conscience in the framework of social reference. Rather, it creates a chaos that, though familiar, is embarrassing.

The pedestrian who refuses to cross the street at the striped crossing is a simple example that illustrates that chain of attitudes, so resistant that Herakles himself would find it a challenge. The pedestrian crosses at the striped walkway only if he’s forced to do so; the policeman who forces him to do so, by means of a fine, does so only if he is aware of the importance of crossing at the striped walkway, or is in turn forced by his superiors to enforce the rule. Everybody knows that without awareness or perseverance in the means of coercion, the pedestrian will never cross at the walkway – unless by coincidence.

So, is the fact that we can move in an organized manner, like the ants, a matter of survival or mere formality? Will it be needed to raise us to the next step of the species’ ladder? And will we get to the top someday without Big Brother imposing fines on us every step of the way?

If we watch how citizens behave in a bus we can agree that there is a similarity between the vehicle and the digestive tract: the orifice of insertion is the front door, the hole of excretion, the back door. Although we know that we mustn’t ingest via the excretory opening, many people attempt to reverse the flow, either for their own convenience or “due to circumstances.” If we look closely, the circumstances are often due to convenience.

In that digestive tube called a bus, the ideal, harmonious flow is achieved (as repeated like a mantra by bus drivers) if we “move to the rear.” That is not, however, our habit. The law of least effort says that human corpuscles should remain as close to the entrance as possible, thus blocking the tube.

It should be said that the law of least physical effort works according to the law of least mental effort, and this physics of thought (call it psychology or philosophy, whatever) obviously doesn’t fit within the usual programs of control and coercion. We have then a factor of mental constipation that resists the efforts of civility’s laxatives.

An even more peculiar case is that of sound pollution. If making noise is culturally acceptable, even encouraged, because it reinforces our sense of presence (without noise we cannot exist), if acoustic enjoyment in our space is a matter of scandal (without loudness we cannot enjoy) and these “values” constitute the rule not the exception, can we expect the inspectors in charge of enforcing the sound-pollution laws to do their job as they should, putting aside the tricky issue of corruption and going against the pathological custom?

As you see, many topics fill the vacuum left by the lack of an organic education into the social space. Outside the classroom, 2 plus 2 not always equals 4 and this is a vacuum that cannot be filled with industrial products, even if they’re “leading edge,” or raw materials, even if they’re “staples.”

When scientists tell us that matter is older than life, they invite us to think that all elements in continuous activity, even subject to surprising transformations, lacked intelligence and that, therefore, life is intelligence.

In societies anchored by the dynamics of the “stamp of approval” and the “opportune moment,” as Cuban society is, it is urgent to recognize that life in our cities often goes on not on the basis of matter but in spite of it and that intelligence is, from a biological point of view, the true and only discriminated-against minority.

To save that element, lost halfway between appetites and the law, a tremendous force will be needed, perhaps like Herakles’, but not the type of force that is fostered by the desire for consumer goods or propelled by the energy of fossil fuels.

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