Carlos Peña: "Transforming the condemnation of violence into a mere neurotic gesture that is repeated time and time again does not lead anywhere."

Carlos Peña: “Transforming the condemnation of violence into a mere neurotic gesture that repeats itself over and over does not lead anywhere” Seven years after the social outburst, the rector of the UDP maintains that Chile has not managed to process the trauma of October 2019 and that the condemnation of violence is not enough to understand what happened. The essayist criticizes the revolutionary illusion of the left, questions the reading of the “criminal outburst” and warns that the inequalities that fueled the unrest are still unresolved. The image of the Enel building on fire was one of the most impactful things left by October 18, 2019. That night, 20 metro stations burned under the fire. While President Sebastián Piñera spoke of a powerful enemy, the left took shape in the idea of “Chile woke up.” Two days after the start of the outburst, Carlos Peña attempted one of the first interpretations of what was happening on the streets: he spoke of a youth defrauded by its expectations, benefited by the expansion of consumption, but which equally experienced inequality and class difference. Weeks later, Peña deepened his analysis in the book *Thinking the Unrest*, where he affirmed that the outburst expressed the contradictions of a society that had experienced accelerated modernization. Chile had reached unprecedented levels of well-being, education, and consumption, but this same progress had awakened expectations that institutions could not satisfy. Today, when José Antonio Kast occupies La Moneda, Peña returns to that paradox. He considers that the revolutionary reading of October was an illusion of the elites, but he also rejects reducing the phenomenon to a criminal conspiracy. October 19 is turned into a trauma, an event that interrupts the continuity of the narrative What meaning does the outburst have today? It has the meaning of a trauma: October 19 is turned into a trauma, an event that interrupts the continuity of the narrative, and that is why any event of disorder or violence, such as that experienced by the universities in recent days, produces a kind of anguish, an anguish-signal, a psychoanalyst would say. But, by analogy, a traumatic event that is not elaborated through reflection returns as a symptom. Peña adds: –I believe it was one of the most significant phenomena of our recent history, because in some way it showed that Chilean society had modified itself very radically and that the institutional arrangements we had made were not up to the mark of the changes it had experienced. The rector of the UDP details that “Chilean society had never been better. We had never had such massification of educational practice, such expansion of consumption, nor did families have in their horizon expectations of a better life than those that existed in 2019. And yet, we had never experienced a greater distance between the expectations each one had and the experience it envisioned for the future. That is the most fundamental feature.” You then spoke of the pathologies of modernization. Do you still think that is the main explanation? Yes. I wrote *Thinking the Unrest* very quickly, two months after this happened. There I suggested that there was a series of pathologies of modernization that had unleashed this phenomenon and that it was a mistake, it seemed to me then and still does to me, to look at it as the fruit of a criminal conspiracy, of a mere ideological delusion or of a machination by the most radical left. However, there is an interpretation that identifies violence as the great protagonist of the outburst. Pablo Ortúzar, for example, has insisted on that dimension. It is undeniable that there was violence. And a violence that had occurred few times, although it had occurred before in the history of Chile. But reducing what then happened to violence seems to me to be a mistake. We must evade the danger—and I do not mean the danger that Pablo Ortúzar incurs—of a unilateral view. It was a much more complex mass phenomenon. The other interpretation, from the left, saw the people rebelling. Yes. They wanted to reread the eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of Marx. Marx said that, in general, this type of revolt is clothed in past events, the old slogans of a previous rebellion that had faded. Some of that happened indeed. There was an emotional, sentimental reaction from the left. The left is in a period of intellectual crisis, in my opinion, very severe and long. The illusion that the model was going to fall? What happened to the left is strange, because after leading and conducting an extremely successful modernizing process, it harbored in itself the feeling that, as its own success advanced, it was leaving something of itself behind. It felt that the price it paid was betraying its old ideals: anti-imperialism, the idea of class parties, in the case of the Communist Party, those kinds of things. And then it was enough for the model, to call it that, the process of development to have a stumble so that that old daydream could be reborn. Carlos Peña recalls the march of a million people: –It was an occasion for each person and each group to express very different demands, without any ideological agenda and without any organization. Demands for gender, for retirement, for equality, environmentalists, cyclists. It was a varied, diverse agenda. The intellectual elites who supported this transformed it into the inevitable, evident sign that Chilean society wanted a radical change and to lay the foundations of a new social order. The idea that it was possible to go back to a zero point of history or of politics was perhaps one of the greatest delusions they suffered then. Since then, has the left made a critical reflection of what happened? The left is in a period of intellectual crisis, in my opinion, very severe and long. It was not able to understand the type of social subject that emerged from the process of greatest well-being that it itself promoted. And because it failed to understand that, it incurred the oversights in which it gradually fell: the abandonment of that agenda and looking back to regret what the left itself had done, to be ashamed of its own work. In a second phase, which coincided with October 2019, it was said that it was possible to radicalize that feeling, to return to a zero point of politics and to re-found the social order. Today, the left is not able to truly understand what has happened. Peña adds: –The left, or rather, the lefts, are in crisis, and it will not overcome it by identifying accidental elements (like the lack of connection in the “territories” or the need to coordinate votes in Congress), but by turning attention to a theoretical and ideological question: What is the social subject that the left itself contributed to build by pushing the modernizing process? How was that process emancipatory for the majorities? What are its pathologies? All those questions, despite their weight, are central to any political project and lead to the conclusion that the only path is an agenda within capitalism, that is, a social-democratic agenda. But the left today prefers to stop at details. Challenges President Kast was one of those who raised the idea of the “criminal outburst.” Is the government falling short if it maintains that reading? I believe so. This type of diagnosis that it was merely a criminal outburst suggests that what happened was the result of a design, of a plan, of a small group that, conspiring, managed to unleash that. That is too simplistic a way to see the phenomenon. Social movements are always animated by small, consistent groups. This is what Hume said: there is nothing more surprising than the ease with which the few are able to dominate the many. But this feature must not make us forget that for that to happen, objective circumstances are required, that there is fuel of a certain magnitude in the subsoil of social life, so that a spark makes it ignite and explode. I do not believe that Chile is ideologically right today, as I never believed it was ideologically left either because it had won Boric. Did the echoes of the outburst contribute to the reaction that allowed Kast to come to power? I remember having observed very early, in the same days of October 2019, that if there was no legitimate repression by the State of the violence that was then experienced, fear and insecurity would prevail, and the right would seize power. Because the right, from the point of view of the spontaneous culture of the majorities, has a more friendly relationship with authority and with the control of order, a matter that does not happen to the left. In a disordered society, with wide areas of anomie in the sphere of culture and in the streets, and with majorities fearful of migration and social insecurity, whoever put a plausible offer of security on the political agenda would win the adhesion of the citizenry. But not an ideological adhesion. I do not believe that Chile is ideologically right today, as I never believed it was ideologically left either because it had won Boric. Minister Quiroz, to continue the analysis, has as his “ideal self” Büchi or Sergio de Castro, those are the figures by which he is measured and to whom he aspires, to be the reconstructor of the foundations of the Chilean economy, the promoter of a second modernization of the economic structure. And how does he interpret the priorities of the Kast government? Does he see social sensitivity? The government has made a diagnosis of the current state of Chilean society that puts what we call social sensitivity in a not entirely priority plane. Its diagnosis, as far as one understands it, is that the environment for decision-making of economic agents is so defective that, if things continue as they are, Chilean society will not take off. So, the effort that this government is making, to read it in its best version, is to lay the foundations for the takeoff of economic and productive growth, even at the cost of high disapproval. I believe that in the imagination of this government is that moment when the great reform of the Chilean economy was made. Minister Quiroz, to continue the analysis, has as his “ideal self” Büchi or Sergio de Castro, those are the figures by which he is measured and to whom he aspires, to be the reconstructor of the foundations of the Chilean economy, the promoter of a second modernization of the economic structure. In an educational system like the Chilean one, severely stratified, which practically reproduces the existing class structure in society, education loses this component of meritocratic promise. You identified a series of pathologies. Have they been faced? Could they generate new unrest? They remain pending. Now, not an unrest of the 2019 kind, of course not. All societies live permanently with a certain unrest. Freud said in a famous book, *The Unhappiness in Culture*. In the current case of Chile, there are some things that require urgent correction and it seems to me that a political agenda should be structured around them. The first is the educational question, because education is finally the promise that a society makes to young people and children that their future, their own life trajectory, will depend on the effort and talent that each one is capable of deploying. This is the promise of education, which is by essence a meritocratic question. But in an educational system like the Chilean one, severely stratified, which practically reproduces the existing class structure in society, both at the school level and, unfortunately, happening at the university level, education loses this component of meritocratic promise. You also spoke of old age. The other topic is old age and illness, because they are experiences that equalize human beings. We will all grow old, we will all get sick. They are the arrows of destiny, Shakespeare said, and Freud repeatedly repeats them. Society has to be able to share the risks of that inevitable experience, and that implies a better pension and health system. These are, I believe, the great challenges for Chilean society in the time to come. Does the current government have concern about these matters? There is a concern in this government that has all my sympathy, despite being quite counterintuitive coming from a university rector, and it is the concern for early childhood. In the first years of people's existence, neural connections are established, when the mother tongue is learned well, when the skills of reading and writing are acquired, and the habits with books and with material objects of culture are acquired. We have to make all that within the reach of the children, especially of poor children. The government's effort to put more resources there, even if they have to be marginally reduced from the university system, seems to me to be a correct decision. Any effort at impartiality forces us to recognize it. Unfortunately, I see that the people who participate in the public sphere, the columnists, the people who opine, tend to still be trapped in the trauma. How should we remember the social outburst? What reflection should the country make? The way to overcome traumatic moments is to process them through words. For that, reflection and intellectual work are required, instead of simply staying in the trauma. But unfortunately, I see that the people who participate in the public sphere, the columnists, the people who opine, tend to still be trapped in the trauma. They look back and, above all, what they do is condemn what happened then. I firmly believe that violence must be condemned and legitimately repressed. But that does not exempt us from thinking about the problem. What underlying social processes were configured so that that could happen? How much of those social processes still persist today? What must we do to resolve them? The condemnation of violence is very well done, and I myself formulated it very early; but transforming the condemnation of violence into a mere neurotic gesture that repeats itself over and over does not lead anywhere. I believe there is no reason for pardon. There was no reason for those so-called “prisoners of the revolt” and there is no reason for the public agents who, by transgressing the law, caused serious injuries to people. President Boric pardoned the so-called “prisoners of the revolt.” What do you think about the possibility of pardoning now police condemned for acts that occurred during the outburst? I believe there is no reason for pardon. There was no reason for those so-called “prisoners of the revolt” and there is no reason for public agents who, by transgressing the law, caused serious injuries to people. It is essential that the punitive power of the State be exercised particularly on state agents when they exercise force illegitimately. Because the State is characterized by monopolizing force and citizens authorize it to exercise it. But the condition we put, and which can never be relativized, is that that force must be exercised based on rules to be legitimate. If a state agent bypasses the rules, acts illegitimately, and harms a citizen, they must be punished. On the other hand, I believe that human rights violators who are on the verge of death, dismembered, suffering, enduring, who are no longer a subject but a body that does not know why it is there, should be able to die in their home. Why do you make that difference? Because in one case there are humanitarian reasons. In the case of human rights violators who are on the verge of death, dismembered, suffering, enduring, who are a pained body, it seems to me an outrage to continue punishing them in that way. But that is different from a state agent in full use of his powers who abandoned the rules and caused harm, and did so deliberately. I do not see humanitarian reasons in that case, nor did I see them when the prisoners of the revolt were pardoned.