In our times, plastic has invaded everything to such an extent that a few brave - and long-suffering, it must be said - people boast of living without plastic. They are featured in TV reports, working like fools to avoid using a single piece of plastic packaging throughout the day. You have to admire their discipline and fervour. But even more admirable would be to lead without lies, don't you think?
Surprised at how the amount of plastic wrapping I have to remove from any product I buy in order to use or eat it has increased over the years, I notice that the lies to cover up the file have also gradually increased. Or maybe they have just been modernised and taken to a new dimension thanks to technology. Is it possible to lead companies or countries #no bullshit in the age of #fakenews?
Recently a client was telling me how tired and fed up she was of having to play the game of photos and events to maintain her reputation as a solvent executive and top advisor. Fulanita, as we shall call her, is a woman with a career spanning more than thirty years in which she has had to risk everything more than once to maintain her integrity and be faithful to her sense of duty. But for some years now she has been torn between what she wants to be and what she has to be. And she is not the only one.
Fulanita escapes on long trips to the ends of the earth three times a year. She leaves Madrid every weekend to compulsively enjoy the mountains or the beach like there's no tomorrow. Her other self fulfils her duties as an executive and advisor from Monday to Friday. So far everything sounds normal. The problem is that she often has to bite her tongue in critical meetings in order not to earn a reputation as a brawler. Or she has to sit down to lunch, smile and make conversation with other executives or board members we all know from their nepotismsits twisted smiletheir abuses of power or their self-interested bungling.
Fulanita tells me that she envies how well another senior executive, whom we will call Menganita, gets around. Fulanita admires how well Menganita puts up with the rudeness at her own events, where certain executives with "fluid" morals come to steal clients among Menganita's carefully selected guests. Liars, businessmen who are always on the take, whose closest friends tend to look like white-collar hoodlums, and when they shake hands with you, they take one arm and two legs.
I have witnessed Menganita get into a hell of a row with an executive - full of noble titles, decorations from business magazines and various business awards - because he was teasing her with that confidence worthy of those who have the upper hand: "because I'm worth it" they say shamelessly in all their gestures, just like the models in the well-known cosmetics advert.
Menganita chooses her battles. The necessary fights she has entered into to defend truth, transparency, objectivity and justice have cost her dearly. She has been made to pay for them with forced departures from prestigious posts, or the loss of lucrative contracts. Or they have ignored it by failing to publish a single sad review of its great achievements while they publish a double-page colour report on how great the count is, three times winner of the "Best of the Best" award of this magazine or that newspaper. I'm sure as you read me you remember all the so-and-so's, so-and-so's and fluids - titled and untitled - of your last ten years ... this is nothing unusual, and nothing new either.
What does it mean to be a fake?
For many this is the price of doing business. It is the price to pay for belonging to certain groups. It is not just the elites. All human groups have their little secrets and hidden exchanges. In all, a hierarchy of power has been built up, and in many, very many, that hierarchy of power has resorted to underhand practices to stay on top for generations.
That is why it is much easier to live without plastics than to live without lies. Those who dare to challenge the established order must confront the entire group that protects - and benefits from - the established order. You only have to walk through the Salamanca neighbourhood to hear the Chavista accent on every corner and see how this dirty money shamelessly irrigates the real estate economy of one of Madrid's most prosperous neighbourhoods.
But what is the price we pay for allowing ourselves to be caught up in the lies and infected by the filth of others? That price is not so obvious because it is not paid in the moment. We don't stop earning money or receiving invitations to events immediately. No. We continue to play the lying game by splitting ourselves in two, like Fulanita. We smile for the cover photo while holding back the nausea inside. Nausea that grows year after year, looking for sedatives to appease the deep discomfort of knowing that one is more successful for lying and indulging than for what one really brings: alcohol, anxiolytics, drugs or sex, any compulsion that for a little while quenches that unpleasant feeling of being a giant.... Fake.
Being a fake It also means living in constant fear of being discovered. It is one snowball that calls another, and then another, and one rolls more and more in a frightening viscosity that is visible on one's face and in one's eyes, especially because one hides it. It is a road that never ends well. Even if you go to your grave with so much filth rotting your soul, the physical and emotional legacy you leave to your heirs oozes the same secret guilt. Look at the number of lavish heirs whose lives have been such a bitch that they have self-liquidated themselves without warning.
Leading without lies is for the brave. It takes a lot of courage to tell off the count "because I'm worth it" and lose everything to his army of liars and mutual cover-ups. It takes very, very big hearts to bear the suffering, the falls from grace and the subtle - sometimes voracious! - humiliations that befall those who question the corrupt hierarchies ...
And in a world dominated by Twitter, Facebook, armies of bots programmed to spread hoaxes, or the new "Deep fakes" (technology capable of imitating the voice and gestures of a public personality in a video saying or doing something unimaginable), living without lies becomes a desperate adventure for sad dreamers or madmen with nowhere to drop dead.
This is where poetry and tales of lifelong heroes catch out high-flying politics and the executive elite of the IBEX35 or the Forbes500. Where all men are equal again. Where we define ourselves by our actions and by our omissions. More in front of ourselves than in front of anyone else. And where we all, even more so the most villainous, deeply admire those who dared to speak or do the truth and suffer the consequences.
For those who have made it this far in this article and have chosen to be heroes, I leave you this verse from a song by the Mexican group Elefantes ("Soy Así", available on Youtube):
"Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but I'd rather be shipwrecked than never leave port. And I'm like that, just like you. I want to die trying one more time. I want to live and never regret it. Never again!"
Pino Bethencourt
Coach and founder of Club Comprometidos