Violence: In A Not Usual Way Of Perception

I don't usually go looking for political philosophy on YouTube. Well, that's not entirely true. I do, but usually in the same way I fall into Wikipedia at 2 a.m.: without a plan and with the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that I have opened a door I probably shouldn't have. That's how I ended up watching Caribbeus, a small Venezuelan YouTube channel that moves somewhere between philosophy, political commentary and video essays. One of the videos I watched was about Chavismo and cruelty, and at the time I came across it, it had around 32,000 views. I mention the number because there is something strangely appropriate about discovering an idea with a relatively small audience when the subject itself is something enormous and almost impossible to contain: violence. Not violence as an abstract political category, not violence as the obligatory word we attach to every discussion about Venezuela, but violence as something we have lived with for so long that I sometimes wonder whether we have become incapable of seeing its actual shape. We talk about repression, authoritarianism, political persecution, corruption, institutional collapse, propaganda, fear. All of these words are valid. All of them are necessary. And yet, after a while, they begin to sound like labels on boxes we have already become accustomed to carrying.

What really stayed with me from that video was the concept of sadomemética. I am deliberately not going to pretend I can give you some definitive academic genealogy of the term, because I can't. And I don't think its meaning can be dismissed simply because the word sounds like an unfortunate child born from the marriage of sadism and memes. There is something much more uncomfortable in the idea. What interests me is the possibility of understanding cruelty not merely as an act, nor even as an instrument of repression, but as something that can become organized, repeated and politically useful. That distinction matters. Violence can be instrumental: force somebody, silence somebody, punish somebody. Cruelty introduces something else into the equation, because suffering itself acquires a function. And when that function becomes systematic, we are no longer talking only about individuals behaving brutally. We are talking about power discovering that the destruction of another person's dignity can communicate something. It can intimidate. It can discipline. It can humiliate. It can make an example. It can teach everyone else where the invisible walls are. This is where the Venezuelan case becomes much darker than the familiar vocabulary of political violence allows me to express.

I am also reluctant to make the easy intellectual leap and call Chavismo “the superior phase of totalitarianism,” because that sounds considerably better than it actually explains. Political science has more than enough categories, and Venezuela does not become intellectually clearer just because we throw the biggest possible word at it. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil is useful precisely because it forces us to think about how violence can become incorporated into ordinary mechanisms, ordinary language and ordinary behavior. But what interests me about Venezuela is what happens when power becomes sufficiently persistent that violence no longer has to be spectacular to be effective. It can become anticipation. You don't need to be arrested to understand that arrest is possible. You don't need to be threatened personally to understand the threat. You don't need someone standing behind you telling you what to say when you have already learned what might happen if you say the wrong thing. At some point, the most efficient expression of power may be the behavior it produces without having to intervene directly. You begin calculating. You become careful. You learn which battles are worth having. You learn which humiliations are simply part of the process. And that, to me, is far more disturbing than the conventional image of violence, because the target is no longer merely your body. It is your sense of agency.

Perhaps this is also where our relationship with power becomes relevant, and this is the part I find hardest to separate from human nature itself. We like to imagine that people want power because they want money, houses, cars, influence, status, access, all those shiny things that make domination look respectable. But power itself has a strange appetite. Once someone has enough money, there is always more money. Enough status becomes insufficient. Enough control creates the desire for greater control. Because power is not only about possessing things; it is about possessing the ability to determine the conditions under which other people exist. And that is where a political project can become genuinely terrifying. Not simply because it wants to remain in power, but because maintaining power can require the systematic destruction of the individual's confidence that his own will matters. Dignity becomes negotiable. Privacy becomes conditional. Freedom becomes something you calculate rather than something you assume. And the worst part is that human beings adapt. We adapt to scarcity, to fear, to absurdity, to institutional humiliation. We make jokes. We create routines. We convince ourselves that something is temporary until “temporary” becomes twenty years. We normalize things not because we approve of them, but because the alternative is psychologically exhausting. Perhaps this is the most disturbing dimension of sadomemética: not that people enjoy suffering, but that cruelty can become so repetitive and politically functional that an entire society begins learning how to live around it.

That is why I don't think the most interesting question about Venezuelan violence is simply how violent the Venezuelan political system has been. We already know the answer is terrible. The harder question is what prolonged exposure to organized cruelty does to the way people perceive themselves, each other and the world around them. What happens when the extraordinary becomes routine? What happens when humiliation stops producing outrage because outrage itself has become exhausting? What happens when freedom is no longer experienced as a condition, but as a gamble? I think this is where Caribbeus gave me something worth thinking about, even beyond whether sadomemética ultimately proves to be the perfect word for it. Violence does not always need to announce itself with blood, uniforms or weapons. Sometimes it works much more quietly. It teaches you to anticipate it. It teaches you to reduce yourself before somebody else has to. It teaches you that dignity has consequences and that silence is cheaper. And perhaps that is the violence we are least prepared to recognize, because recognizing it would mean admitting that violence has not only changed the country around us. It may have changed the way we look at ourselves inside it.