VESPEIRO

For a human being who would sacrifice everything so as not to sacrifice his own dignity, the final degree of hopelessness is having that very sacrifice go unacknowledged. A secret Stalin-like political assassination steals from a man not only his life but also its meaning, as well as his moral legacy.

His past, his present and his future are thus terminated.

The new communication technologies that operate outside the reach of national states have restored the value of human dignity as a means of political action. The sacrifices that must be made in order to build democracies can no longer be hidden from the public. Resistance has had its meaning restored.

That is how the ritual suicide of a simple fruit salesman in Tunisia set the Arab World on fire. That is what keeps burning revolts such as the one in Syria – sustained only with heroism, with none of the NATO’s firepower that stimulates resistance in Lybia and none of the media coverage that protected Egypt’s rebels.

I was in Norway on May the 11th, 12th and 13th, taking part in the Oslo Freedom Forum, in which 40 lecturers from around the world brought us their testimony on the struggle for human rights in their countries. This organization is different from its precursors as it shows real concern for human rights, refraining from singling out those who violate such rights according to whichever reasons are given for doing so.

There I had the opportunity of listening to terrible statements from the victims of some of the world’s most vicious dictators from regions of Asia and Africa not yet covered by the new communication technologies; of feeling firsthand the enthusiasm, the hopefulness and the apprehension of the youth that fuels the “Arab Spring” on the Internet; of listening to the dictators’ victims as well as the victims of terrorism in the war brought by ideology to the “peace and love generation” in Latin America; of tasting the disillusion of those who, after years of struggle against dictatorships, are only beginning to understand how far they still are from attaining Democracy.

From Oslo we can conclude that these new technologies are powerful tools in tearing down dictatorships but can not do very much to build democracies.

Excluded its most extreme features, the meeting was like a film played in fast-forward portraying this newspaper’s saga, which started with the goal of forcefully obtaining from the Emperor the end of slavery and the creation of the Republic, survived two long periods of dictatorship, having played a decisive role in their downfall and, 136 years later, is still around in a country divided by the same usual power that, through the distribution of small privileges and “special rights”, institutionalize and disseminate the very corruption that erodes us so as to better exploit us indefinitely.

In order to better reproduce the very reality it wants to change, the Oslo Freedom Forum would do well to be divided into two different parts so as to include an opportunity to share experiences – possibly less exciting, but surely just as important – on the institutional solutions that have actually helped building and consolidating democracies in real-world situations.

That is precisely what we lack the most in a world in which all know what to reject in terms of political regime and also, almost instinctively, what to do in order to get rid of the regimes which are imposed on them, but very few know how to get ahead after this phase has been overcome.

As it enters the 3rd Millennium, having been excused of wasting any more time with the fallacies of ideology – the most auspicious confirmation I was able to gather from the new generation’s statements in Oslo – , humanity is now sufficiently mature to understand that Democracy is, above all, a matter of the quality of the institutional technology employed.

Ever since Ancient Rome, which succumbed decisively to corruption precisely for never having found an answer for this problem, a single aspect of the Republican model went through developments that have indeed improved Democracy’s quality. Those were the ones implemented to answer somewhat effectively the question: “How can we concretely empower those that, in the regime ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’, must be the ones in charge, so as to ensure they are properly obeyed by their elected representatives, which are the ones that must follow the people’s will?”

Improving the average level of education of a people is, without any doubt, the way of reaching these answers for the first time. But once a good solution is found, it should and must be copied elsewhere.

The most significant hurdle for this exchange is the fact that the few peoples that actually live in fully-fledged democracies today are generations away from the decisive moments of their conquests. They take for granted the rights they were born with and therefore indulge in debating small details as if they were matters of life and death.

And that helps the entire world – made more susceptible to trends and fashions by the ever increasing speed of communication – to forget the essentials and focus only on passionately debating that which is superfluous.

The differences to which every individual is entitled, whose debate now siphons all the energy that should be directed to obtaining the real thing, must, even by definition, remain outside the reach of any institutions. These are matters of personal choice; reflections of the exercise of freedom, and not prerequisites to attaining it.

In order to transform the history of the achievements that have broadened and consolidated civil liberties in real situations into practical advice and step-by-step scripts for those still far from obtaining them, it would be necessary for this history to be recollected, in each country, by foreign eyes, in a great common effort compiling a comparative history of national institutions.

That would be a fitting mission for those who seek to expand human rights throughout the world.

First published in O Estado de S. Paulo’s may 21st, 2011 edition