May 24, 2018
Venezuelan Elections. We Did Not Abstain, We Stood Still
“Being still is not the same as doing nothing”. Chinese proverb.
It means that relaxing or lazing is not the same as being still, immobile, silent, since the latter is a deliberate and voluntary act. People generally misinterpret abstention in an election as lack of interest, indifference, etc. Last Sunday there was no abstention in the Venezuelan presidential election. We did not stay at home loitering; the whole country was interested in the result, so the vast majority of us just stood still, silently boycotting the rigged election staged by a rotten regime, which is in the last throes of a slow but certain death.
Being still means to be very conscious of our actions. Henri Falcon, by posing as the opposition candidate, was trying to fish in the troubled waters of the national discontent with Maduro’s regime. He waved, as the cure of all the evils that are savaging the Venezuelans, the magic wand of pegging the economy to the dollar. I would say to Falcon, paraphrasing Bill Clinton in his famous reflection of the campaign that led to his election, “It’s not the economy, stupid”. The economy is a means to achieve prosperity; it is not an end in itself. Falcon prettied up the re-election of the “grotesque caudillo” Nicolás Maduro, and his great achievement was, according to Andrés Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, “making a fool of himself”. Moreover, he sabotaged the voters boycott, and pulverized the fragile unity of the opposition.
In spite of all that, more than ten million Venezuelans stood still, silently protesting one of the crudest electoral swindles of modern times in the Western Hemisphere. Our silence was heard around the world. 24 hours after the election, 44 countries had repudiated the election results for “not complying with the international standards of a democratic, free, fair and transparent process”.
Map of international reactions to the May 20 elections in Venezuela. Blue: They do not recognize the regime. Red: They recognize the regime
As of May 21, Nicolás Maduro, “The butcher”, is officially dictator of Venezuela. Given this fact, it is worrisome that more than 1,800,000 Venezuelan opponents were enchanted by Falcón’s siren song. They did so motivated to find a quick fix that would ease their basic needs. Even more disturbing was the mass of between 3 and 5 million people who somehow are attracted, and continue to vote for a system that inflicts inhuman suffering upon them. It is as if they are experiencing the battered wife syndrome. They are the most vulnerable part of the population, and they deserve to be treated with compassion, instead of being extorted to vote for the regime in exchange for a crust of bread.
How did we get to this?
Barrett Values Centre made in 2010, and updated in 2017 the “Evaluation of National Values of Venezuela”. That study showed that the country had a 72% of Cultural Entropy, and that the values corresponding to the Current Culture, were: “Corruption, Conflict / Aggression, Crime / Violence, Bureaucracy, Guilt, Poverty, Uncertainty about the future, Centralized government, Wasted resources and Unemployment”.
Another study conducted by BVC shows that the extremely high level of entropy is costing the nation almost three times its GDP.
“The Cultural Entropy score reveals the degree of dysfunction (friction and frustration) in an organisation or any human group structure (community or nation) that is generated by the self-serving, fear-based actions of the leaders. As the Cultural Entropy score increases, the level of trust and internal cohesion decreases”.
Venezuela has one of the highest rates of cultural entropy in the world, and both sides of our leadership, government and opposition, have been accurately described by the Cultural Entropy definition above. You can expect anything from a government run by drug dealers and large-scale thieves. However, what really worries me, and more than 10 million Venezuelans, is that given the seriousness of the country’s situation, the opposition leaders continue to look after their own personal interests and power quotas, instead of acting for the good of the country.
I spoke with Richard Barrett in 2016 and asked him his opinion of the venezuelan national values. He said to me “ Our study confirms the chaos you are experiencing, as well as providing information on the desired culture…”. This is what the report succinctly says about the country: “Entropy: 72%. Values above 40%. High risk of implosion, bankruptcy, or failure.” I would add to that, “All of the above”. They were spot on.
The task of rebuilding the country is gigantic. The Venezuelan civil society, represented by NGOs, universities, and different professionals, have drawn the route that has to be traveled for the country’s material material recovery. It all begins with changing the regime. A new government will reestablish the democratic institutions, free the political prisoners, establish humanitarian aid channels, reactivate the economy, restitute the hundreds of thousands of companies and acres of farms that were occupied, nationalized, or simply stolen by the regime, dismember and modernize the enormous central government bureaucracy, which is a source of corruption, a drain of material and human resources, and the cause of the inefficiency and paralysis of the public sector, and countless of other actions. However, everything depends on changing the regime. Therefore, what would we do?
We did not change the regime, and our leadership sucks. So what comes after the election?
In the second part of this article, we will explain what we, as concerned change makers, can and will do.
With love
Helio Borges
Helio Borges is a bilingual (Spanish- English) writer. He writes about Personal Growth, Spirituality, Psychological Wellbeing, and Organizational and Social change. He has an experience of more than 20 years in Change Management in organizational settings. He is a member of the community of changemakers who uses the “Theory U” methodology, created by Otto Scharmer Senior Lecturer of MIT. He co-hosts the Caracas u.lab Hub in Venezuela. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Boston University. He is an Ontological Coach, Positive Psychology and Theory “U” workshop facilitator and speaker.
