_Source

Please receive a warm greeting, dear reader.

I am writing this letter in order to address the most serious problem that we Venezuelans - note the "we" - suffer in our society.

I have come to speak to you about victimhood, culture, and how this era of post-truth is more deeply rooted in Venezuela than ever before. For those who do not know the term of post-truth, it is the deliberate distortion of reality, that is to say, to put feelings and emotions before objective facts, reason, the use of logic, empirical evidence, etc....

As you can see today, many people blame the situation in Venezuela on political and economic factors, many even say that the problem must be solely and exclusively with the current government, its bad administrations, and ideology and that when they leave the country everything will improve and everything will be perfect. But even though a large part of the blame lies with them, nobody sees beyond what is really happening, so today I decided to do my own analysis of the situation and go beyond what is seen visually.

The ideologies of victimhood and paternalism have been around in Venezuela for centuries, but it wasn't until the education systems were controlled by the state that there really was an explosion in the way Venezuelans see the world. In the books of education, our politicians and intellectuals taught us or rather indoctrinated us and indoctrinated us in how we have always played the role of victims as a country, of the conquest of the Spanish, of U.S. imperialism, of international business, and a host of issues that contribute to the thought of victimization. It is normal to promote the idea that we are doomed to failure because we were born as an oppressed and plundered nation like many others that today have higher living standards than those of colonizing countries such as Canaanite, Australia and New Zealand. But the truth is that playing the role of victims ended up generating tremendous damage to our society in many aspects such as our idiosyncrasies and our culture. Having seen no improvement in their environment or living conditions, the Venezuelans began to look for saviors who would show them the way to the supposed light and offer them a lot of promises, which were empty, pure demagoguery. That is to say, the Venezuelan began to think in the following way:"'I am not going to vote for the one who speaks the truth to me, but I will vote for the one who promises me the most, and that is how thought is maintained today, and that is why the arrival of the government of Chávez and the current government is taking place.

Victimism is so ingrained in our society that I would dare to say that most Venezuelans feel they are victims of the current government without thinking that they themselves voted for the government. These are the same people who feel that they are victims of xenophobia, and who believe that because of the situation they have the right to take their culture with them and impose it on other countries and that this type of action will not generate any problem in other cultures and societies, and always - the Venezuelans - end up concluding that what is wrong are the other cultures that are not "chevereseballs" and if in this case there is an attack due to an action badly done by a Venezuelan, the other countries are some xenophobes. And the problem ends up being with other countries and not with us.

And it is incredible how we put our feelings of victimhood before the truth and reality, to the point of believing that everything bad belongs to someone else and not to us, even though nobody has noticed this, is that we have become a totally selfish and anthropocentric society. The surprising thing about this is that there is no politician, activist, party member or economist - who are supposed to be the most educated people in our society - to tell us that the problem is really cultural and societal and the Venezuelan way of thinking, but that everyone is involved in a farce because they believe that the problem lies in the current government, leaving aside that it was the same people who decided to vote for this government. We have to stop this absurd post truth and begin to take responsibility for our actions and contributions to the deterioration of Venezuela, because Venezuela is a whole for Venezuelans, and we are all guilty that the country is not working and will not work.

Tell me, how many times have you not eaten the light when it was red? How many times did they not cross the street other than the striped one? How many times have you not paid managers to speed up a process? How many times have you driven without a license or car papers? How many times have you paid a cop not to ticket you? How many times have you taken advantage of other people because of your "Creole liveliness"? What did they believe that all these actions, among many others, did not help the deterioration of the nation? Well, the truth is that when we ask ourselves these questions we answer that if others do, why don't I? Why not me, then, is the most carcinogenic thought of our contemporary society.

If you want to build a viable country that is a world model, start with yourself, without seeing other people, you are the only ones who have the power to change the situation, because the moment we all change our way of thinking and take responsibility for helping the country to be as it is, we will come out of this cyclical decline that has been rooted in our worldview for more than 75 years.

The problem with the current Venezuelan is that he puts his emotion and feeling before anything else, and let me tell you that I too was part of the victimizing worldview of our society and put feelings and emotions before facts. And I was there believing that the problem lay with others and not with myself, and it wasn't until I really realized that I was part of and contributed to the deterioration, that I became a rational person and responsible for my actions. Our society has two options, either to continue with the ideas of victimhood and continue to reflect the same ideas in our government institutions or to remove this idiosyncratic uneasiness and begin to rise once and for all and because of the way things are going, people prefer the first option.

Best regards.