Culture and Ideology
Two complex concepts that demand understanding more than explanation.
The word culture has over fifty definitions, from the sciences of Anthropology, History, and Sociology.
There are also very profound conceptions of culture in Psychology. We know that culture creates symbolic meaning (symbols are mental images and emotional sensations) for human actions and facts; everything we think has cultural meaning.
Think of a language you've just created. If there's no one else in the world capable of understanding and speaking it, it's meaningless.
A language is designed for people to exchange information and communicate accurately. A language belongs to a community and is created collectively by the community; it is the property of the community, a cultural heritage.
Communication isn't just through language; we know this; babies and animals communicate, plants exchange information.
Our nervous system communicates throughout the body between biosystems. T-lymphocyte cells communicate to direct the immune system to fight viruses, bacteria, and any agent invading the body's cells.
To communicate with each other, a signaling system called a protocol is needed. This is a written or unwritten manual that can be visual or symbolic, audible, or written as an alphabet and a vocabulary, with a grammar and semantic rules to be encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver.
Culture began when this agreement was reached within the community to exchange messages at a higher level of cognitive evolution. From a facial expression, a traffic sign, a fallen tree or a broken branch, a smell, a scream—all information signals communication derived from a culture.
Our first definition of culture would then be the ability to communicate feelings, desires, alerts, information, and instructions. Thus, beings can communicate and exchange a code that may or may not be well understood. Communication problems can arise; the more prepared one is to decipher culture, the easier communication becomes.
Language can be a foreign or local language, a dialect, slang, or a "linguage" (slang) such as the "linguage" (slang) used by economists, doctors, engineers, musicians, skateboarders, and sailors. Each group has its own way of exchanging information within its own cultural framework, called specific subcultures.
Politics is a subculture with its own language, distinct from the rest of society, with its own symbols, customs, and methods. This is the case with doctors, engineers, mechanics, young people, Protestants, Catholics, and skateboarders—all of whom have their own language patterns and ways of communicating within their own worlds.
What we will examine is the manner and vocabulary of political "linguage."
Political behavior should not be confused with everyday social or domestic behavior outside of the political sphere.
Human beings are multi-affiliated beings. This means that a politician is simultaneously affiliated with many groups and uses many types of language specific to each of the separate and distinct groups. For example:
1 – Adult man;
2 – Young man;
3 – Married man;
4 – Single man;
5 – Card player;
6 – Christian churchgoer;
7 – Single woman;
8 – Young mother;
9 – Grandmother;
10 – Soccer fan;
11 – Teacher;
12 – Police officer;
13 – Driver;
These are just a few of the thousands of examples of groups to which people belong, and in each of them, they must make a commitment to communicate according to the rules and with body, visual, written, and oral language to be accepted and remain a member of the group.
There is no school to learn the culture of a group, of a people. Even the correct intonation of words and the tonic accent of syllables belong to the local cultural code. Outsiders can learn the language, but the precise placement of words, phrases, and pronunciation possess nuances and secrets that locals can perceive in a foreigner or outsider.
Political culture also cannot be taught; it is a cultural behavior with its own symbols and language, just as a newly converted novice needs to be enthroned in the culture and liturgy, in aesthetic body language, and in ethical posture in accordance with the religious community.
So I will not describe political culture, as it is clear that each country has its own unique elements in its political culture, which cannot be copied, taught, or transplanted to other countries, and vice versa.
There is no universal form of democracy that applies everywhere in any timeline. When the Europeans arrived in the future Americas, neither the Native Americans nor the colonizers were aware of their cultures, of the importance of each act, nor of the value of the discovery, nor of the scale of the lands discovered, nor of the cultures found there.
Both, the colonizer and the colonized, learned from each other: the Europeans learned to smoke, learned to bathe, learned the ease of wilderness without the rigidity of schedules, routines, or the economy of accumulation. They brought tomatoes, chocolate, and potatoes from here, and received the language, cities, the compass, books, mathematics, and clothing. It was an exchange of cultures, so that both sides changed each other.
There are as many forms of democracy as there are cultures in different countries. Even communism has different versions in each country where it was implemented, and it is always continually changing over time.
Politicians' actions follow an ethic different from religious and socially accepted moral and ethical principles. Politics follows the ethic of results, that is: the ends justify the means. The ruler is not concerned with who he will harm; he simply redistributes the burdens and benefits according to the convenience of the responsibilities of the State's commitments. This is the authentic statesman.
Drivers get irritated when the traffic light turns red as they cross an intersection, but the same traffic light, or its coordinated counterpart, turns green for vehicles in the opposite lane or in the adjacent or congruent lane.
The function of politics is to penalize one party so that the other party benefits, and like a traffic light, the victim is expected to receive compensation.
No political candidate promises things that will cause discomfort. As if they could intervene without causing turmoil and disrupting people's lives, such as digging trenches and excavating to install sewage, stormwater, telecommunications, and electrical systems, paving, or building overpasses, that discomfort can last a long time, and bad politicians don't risk starting these projects that initially bring inconvenience and complaints from the people.
On the other hand, companies wouldn't invest in projects that don't yield results in a reasonably short period of time. However, the government can execute a twenty-year project, such as the construction of a hydroelectric plant that will change people's lives for over a hundred years, a nuclear power plant, or basic education that will yield results for another generation.
Politics is a dangerous dance between immediate gratification and commitments to achieving results that may take up to another century to be achieved and rewarded.
The culture of corruption is not a characteristic or privilege of politicians, it is just that the State's resources are so large that it attracts attention precisely because of the publicity given by the cross-regulatory systems of oversight and auditing that make misuse of funds more transparent.
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