As I write this, the international spectacle that the 2020 United States elections are continues, some say that Biden already won, others say that there was fraud, that the real winner is Trump, and I, in fact, remain equanimous, which is not due to the fact that I live in another country, but is due to the fact that I have learned not to give as much importance to the things that I cannot control. And don't get me wrong, what happens in this election is going to have a significant impact on the whole world, for better and for worse, but most people, ordinary and common people like me, have no real power to change the result of it. We do not live in the ancient and little Athens, where each citizen had more direct contact with power, and ordinary people actually knew politicians. For us modern men, politicians are just strangers, people that most of us see only on television, who are never really close to us, and who we will never get to know. We only know who they appear to be, we only know the image that these people want to sell us, and we decide whether to believe them or not. Strangers that we will choose to rule entire nations. We live in a very big world, everything has changed since ancient times, nations are no longer cities of only thousands of square kilometers, but entire countries of hundreds of thousands and even millions of square kilometers, with millions and millions of people. In such a place, it is impossible for a person, and an ordinary person, to have real power.
Millions of us go to the polls and vote for a man we hardly know to rule unimaginable stretches of the earth's surface. The subject who is elected ends up having such great power that it is only comparable with the responsibility that accompanies it. The president will have to govern over a territory that he would never be able to travel, among which are places that he will never visit, of which he does not know and will never know the name. Places of which he will never have the slightest evidence that they even exist. And most will trust that this man will know more what is best for these places than even the people who have lived there all their lives. Surprisingly in these places that this president will never know, as if they were colonies of the capital, his power will remain intact, and his orders will be carried out. This is because people have this illusion that the head of state somehow "knows" what is going on there, and that he has their best interests at heart. This is one of the greatest vices of the centralized states in which we live, which dilute the power of large populations and concentrate it in the hands of a few. The common citizen has very little power to choose who will be the president of the nation, his vote is one in millions, or hundreds of millions, and the president has a lot of power over this citizen. Basically, the common citizen has lost all his power.
But it does not have to be this way, the reason why I say that I remain equanimous and that I don't worry about things that I cannot control, such as who will be the winner of these or those elections, does not mean that I give up my power, but rather I take it, because I do give importance to the things that I can control, where my presence and my will can generate a change, that is why I focus less on things that happen at such great levels that I cannot conceive, such as what happens in these elections, and I focus more on what happens at the local level, what happens around me, what I can actually do and generate change, and not what I cannot change. Little or nothing we can do to change what happens in the world at a general level, we can decide whether to reject what happens and suffer for it, doing enormous harm to ourselves, or if we accept what happens and live with it, but that's what our choice comes down to. But in our immediate reality, we do have a significant impact, there we do have power, even many times more power than politicians have, so I prefer to concentrate much more on this, and less on the "big picture" in which we let go of our power to become mere spectators of a great theater.
When people stop being passive observers of the events that happen at world levels, and even national levels, and become agents of change at the local level, then power is redistributed again and passes from the hands of few to many, in this way centralization becomes de facto decentralization, without changing a single law, the entire system is changed.
A clarification that I want to make after rereading the post is that, at no time am I saying that I personally should have a greater power when deciding what happens in elections like these that happen in the United States, I only use them as an example to demonstrate the little real power that people have in it thanks to centralization.
Image Source: 1
