Gringo View: A Light In The Isolation Tunnel

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) There is very little positive to gather from these months of isolation. In fact, when it is over, it is hardly likely to go down as a high point in any of our lives. But there may be an inspirational light at the end of this long tunnel.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that, while forced to confront the loneliness, boredom and disorientation, hallmarks of these months, we can make use of our extra hours to search for something outside of our normal lives, something which may inform a new normal, which may hint at the future direction for our societies

We couldn’t have a better guide than José “Pepe” Mujica, the former president of Uruguay who spent 14 years in prison as a convicted terrorist, ten in solitary confinement, two at the bottom of a well with only ants and rats for company. “A lot of what came afterwards was the fruit of how much I thought, thought and rewound,” he said in a long 2014 ‘Economist’ interview’.

That thought and rewinding informed a unique life in Uruguayan and all politics, a life devoted to concentration on what he had distilled as the basics and essentials of modern existence. He described himself in a BBC interview as “an eccentric old man, but this is a free choice—with fewer possessions comes less stress.”

He exemplified this during his five-year Presidency, declining to live in the presidential palace or to use its large staff. “If democracy means representing the majority,” he explained, “as a symbol I think that those with the highest responsibilities should live like the majority do, not the minority.” He became famous for continuing to live simply with his wife on a farm owned by her on the outskirts of Montevideo, donating most of his official salary to charity, travelling around in a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle and passionately cultivating chrysanthemums for local sale.

It was out of the years in isolation in prison that he refined his view of how we must live if we are to survive as a civilization, a view he expressed in a landmark 2013 speech to the UN General Assembly  which has great resonance today. In it, he unabashedly took all the world’s governments to task.

Humanity, he said, had sacrificed the old immaterial god and now occupied the temple of the “market god”. Society is immersed in a culture of consumerism, we are all immersed, and it is difficult for society to see this. But there will come a time when people have had enough.

According to him, when people could no longer consume, they were struck by a feeling of frustration, suffered from poverty and were marginalized. He said the international community needed a combination of lofty politics and scientific wisdom. There was a great deal of energy in the world, he said, if only the world could work together to use it properly. He noted that poverty could be eliminated from the planet if future generations could begin to reason as a species, not just as individuals.

Reasoning as a species would mean a major paradigm shift, putting the life and future of the species ahead of our individual greed. Humans are not the only greedy species but we have a predilection for acquiring things we don’t need, things Mujica would say are simply offerings to the false “market god”. These are things which do nothing for us but create barriers to the kind of humanistic endeavors that bring peace instead of conflict and war.

We must revive the planet instead of contributing to its destruction. Mujica has argued “We have become feudal and the monarchy has come back in a different form. Presidents—the red carpet, those who play bugles, vassals on the bridge, all this paraphernalia which is not republican, because republics came into the world to reaffirm this: that men are basically equal.”

However much we’ve binged on Netflix and helped our kids build Lego fortresses and do their virtual schoolwork, ordered ‘safe’ food deliveries, followed the endless ‘breaking news’ of the growing number of Covid-19 cases and deaths and of Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s daily outrages, if you are anything like me, you must have become moderately or intensely bored.

Psychologists tell us that reducing boredom requires that individuals solve the problems that produced it – not having sufficient activities that are both meaningful and optimally challenging. That is certainly the case for many of us. Boredom is a sign that we may be missing something, that we ought to stop what we’re doing, and do it better – or do something else.

In solitary confinement, ‘Pepe’ Mujica didn’t have our luxury of doing ‘something else’. What he discovered was that his place as part of our species far outweighed his individual person. That was the light at the end of the tunnel which guided him and gave him strength.

As he argued before the world’s leaders at the UN, today it was time to begin to fight, and to prepare for a world without borders. What was needed, he said, was “to redefine working hours, converge currencies, finance the global struggle for clean water, battle desertification, recycle more, and counter global warming.”

“There will come a time when people have had enough. When people start to have a lot, they tend to run out of time to be happy and then they begin to reassess the small things in life. Freedom has two planes: one is of an individual kind, that to be free I have to have free time. If all of the time I am working to produce things that I need to be able to consume it will be difficult for me to be a free man.”

If we are bored and frustrated with our isolation, if we are struggling to get reengaged in the new world which is emerging, we would do well to try and see our individual selves as Mujica saw himself, not as selfish individuals but as part of a species of truly free men.

Note: The documentary, ‘El Pepe: A Supreme Life’, streaming on Netflix, is a must for those who wish to know more.