In the quest of the positive: a new thinking for fixing the Mexican Gotham.
By Jorge Visoso


Shanghai, March 21 2009.

Now that the world economy experiences one of its worst crisis in decades, people feel uncertainty about the future. The economy is in crisis and people fear that their countries probably are not going to be viable in the future. That´s what you read in the US newspapers of these days and that’s also the image that Japan and Europe project. Even the so far triumphant China is scared about its chances to face the future.

The same is true in Mexico, where opinion leaders are starting to address this crisis as one of the worst in the history of our country. In our case, however, the current economic crisis is not really the reason people feel so bad about the general situation of the country. The economy is not growing, it’s true, but for a generation of Mexicans – my generation- the country’s economy has never been anything really special that make us raise our hands to the sky. In contrast to regions such as East Asia, we have never really seen that economically speaking things goes any better. Mexicans are accustomed to the mediocrity of their economy.

The woes of Mexicans come from realities that are really unprecedented for us. Since 2007, in our country more than 10,000 people have been killed in the war that the Mexican government has supposedly launched against drug traffic gangs. That number of people killed and the way that many people are being killed daily –executions, grenades, people beheaded, criminals that throw their enemies into acid- are things we never saw before and that make us think on how low we have fallen. That, until recently, undefined reality of a democracy and a market economy such as Mexico gained in recent months the label that it really deserved: Mexico as a failed State. For many people, the application of this term to the case of Mexico is an unacceptable exaggeration; for some minority, like me, is fair.

The drug´s war violence is in fact only the cherry on the top of the comprehensive crisis that Mexico has gone into: crime everywhere; extended corruption in the government (police, local governments, judges, Congress, etc); unchecked power of the monopolies of the economy and the media; increasing polarization of society where the rich become richer and the poor poorer; breakdown of Mexican educational system, etc. Like it or not, Mexico has become in a very short span of time a country similar to Gotham -the city where Batman lives- that is dominated by criminal gangs, where the evil triumphs and the fair and good causes are defeated by the powerful. If there are some people who deny that Mexico is a failed State, at least we can not deny the long list of our failures.

The worst is that it doesn’t feel that the Mexican government is doing anything significant to address our multiple and pressing problems and as a consequence the ordinary Mexican citizen tends to evade this reality or feels desperate about a complexity he can not change.

The Mexican intellectuals, writers and opinion leaders do not seem to react to the crisis in a very different way. They feel also desperate and the only thing that they do is criticize everything: the system, the president, the powerful men; they criticize the judges, they criticize the mayor of Mexico city, they criticize the church, the army. Our comprehensive and old crisis has made our thinking hyper critical and has reduced our perspective to the negative, the bad, the impossible. Because everybody feels helpless and hopeless, the brightest minds of Mexico doesn’t think anymore on how to correct our situation and fix our problems; they don’t think anymore on how to make our Mexico, in our own context, a better place. Crime, corruption and mediocrity have become distinctive features of my country and our national sport is criticism.

I acknowledge that I have been a champion of this Mexican national sport. Most of what so far I have read in my life regarding my country is negative, the education I received in college was focused on the negative and that means I haven’t been trained on thinking about solutions to our problems. Now I state that I am sick of my hyper criticism, I relinquish my crown as a champion of the negative and I declare my aspiration to become one of those who proposes solutions.

This change of mindset comes from my readings. In Mexico people say “tell me who you are with and I tell tell you who you are”. Something similar is true when it comes to readings: tell me what you read and I will tell you what you think. In my case, regarding politics, I have gone from Marxist philosophy,, when I was a college student to a new range of readings about the world. Consequently my thinking has evolved.

Not very long time ago I discovered the pleasure of reading in English and I discovered what seems to me as an English speaking countries tradition: the application of ideas to reality. Criticizing reality and then proposing ideas to change it. I believe that Mexico needs that. We need to change our focus and think about what is positively feasible in order to improve our reality.

This that I am writing now is inspired on the reading of the articles of Thomas L. Friedman on the New York Times and on his most recent book Hot, Flat and Crowded, which I am delightfully reading. I find that in his writings Friedman makes very sharp criticism on what in his opinion has gone wrong in the US and he cast light on where the US should head to and on the people that in the US and outside the US are doing positive things the American government, corporations and society can learn from.

In the introduction to his new book, Friedman defines the nature of the problems that the US is facing and identifies the bad tendencies that he sees in the US. At the end of the introduction he refers to the need of an internal “nation-building” and he speaks about all the people in the US or abroad that are doing something positive in order to do that nation-building.

Something also important is that Friedman criticises but he doesn’t write to destroy or to denounce others. There’s no resentment in his writing.

I think we need people as Friedman who speaks about clear minded goals for our Mexico and who tell us who in the world and in our country is doing positive things and how our government, our Mexican corporations and our people can learn from those experiences. We need to inaugurate an intellectual quest for the positive in the world and in Mexico, a quest that give us inspiration that make us contribute, that make us organize ourselves for collective purposes and that make us push our government for actions that change our country.

The thinking that we need to get out of Gotham has to be free of resentment and has to be positive in nature. It has to seek solutions and it has to have as an aspiration the goal of improving our reality.

But how can we Mexicans develop this new thinking I am calling for or how can be optimistic or positive when all that surrounds us looks negative? How can we lucidly think about what our country needs when all that our Mexican newspapers give us is the description of problems and tragedies? How can we come up with an innovative thinking when we are so accustomed to expect solutions from above? How can we imagine new ways of living and producing when we are so accustomed to see our nearest reality? What is important in our past and in our present to build our future?

My opinion is that thinking creatively demands changing our sources of traditional information. If we are going to propose fresh ideas we need to look for a different kind of news. Why, instead of learning how the drug gangs kill their enemies, we don’t get more interested -as Friedman does-in people that are innovating in Mexico or in experiences that are applicable to Mexico? We need to cast light on what is positive and good, good Mexican businesses, scientists, innovators, social workers, etc.

I also believe that we are not going to thrive as a society and as individuals if we don’t think in ways that make us a contributing part and not only a beneficiary. We need to desire to be a part of the solution of our Mexican crisis and we need to be willing to work for it.

One more requirement of the new thinking I am seeking is that we need to see Mexico in perspective. Mexico is not the only country in the world where its citizens feel their country is in crisis. I remember having conversations with Italians and they complained about Berlusconi; if you watch movies from Peru, Brazil or Argentina the only thing that you see are problems, corruption, crime, just the same problems we have. So, if much more people suffers as us, we need more perspective, for assessing our problems as well as for looking for solutions.

Something that I see in writers such as Friedman is a capacity to be systematic and to sum up the complexity of the US problems and propose solutions that look like viable. We need also that.

My last requirement would be that we need thinking that test our new Mexican democracy. A thinking that proposes solutions that are inviable is not acceptable. We live in a country that is defined as a democracy (no matter you agree or not) and we need to play in this system. We need to think in terms of this system, which means that we need to be realistic. So our new thinking has to provide clues on how people can organize to do what we have to do to reform Gotham.

The above described quest of the positive is my goal for this Mind Harbour, in which I aspire to write, as Friedman and others do, on the things that my country is doing and can do to change the Gotham-like reality it has become. I start now my personal quest for the positive.