I wrote here that society and politics would not change despite the impact of COVID-19. And this theory seems to be confirmed. Society does not want to look itself in the eye. Each one of us is capable of seeing, understanding and perceiving according to our vital, mental and emotional training at home, at school, in our life experience. If I bring you the countryside, you will not differentiate a grain of wheat from a grain of oats or barley, let alone the multiple floral and herbaceous expressions of our attacked mother nature. It would be the same if I invited them to palpate nodules or auscultate pulmonary wheezing. They have not been trained, and it would be useless to insist. Take note of this "blindness" to what we have not seen before: we have not been trained in it, it limits our intelligence to the highest degree when we deal with complex subjects and attack what questions us. The social, the political, the cultural, not to mention looking inside oneself, seeing and admitting the 80% influence of our mental processes that do not pass through consciousness, are all complex, unseen without training.
Reality is so complex that there is no choice but to admit our limitation and join together to understand
The politician believes and tries to impose that everything is political, the economist too, and so on. Therein lies part of our misfortune and the few possibilities to change as a society.
Parliament should be an example of the contribution of partial visions, of the recognition of the limitations of our ideologies, in order to find solutions, but it is not and will not be. They have no diagnosis, they will not find the treatment and we will continue to be trapped in their infantile quarrels and prey to their insatiable need for tension, to make us return to the mental situations of childhood, of good or bad. They themselves have fallen into their own trap and do not know how to get out.
We see their debates: they don't listen to each other, they don't respect each other, they don't value each other. They make faces of circumstance as if they were influenced by what their opponent is saying. They speak for the television cameras, and they don't value us either, they treat us like idiots, they want us passive, idiotised. It is a neurosis that cannot be cured, even if another pandemic comes along.
In Spain it is perhaps very serious, because for training from school has not prepared us for living the complex. Today's students recognise that they study to take exams, not to learn. We have to realise that they have diluted everything, values, education, morals, effort, merit... and everything has been to have voters once the hostility of blocs has been achieved. In the absence of culture and intellectual training, ideology is enough for us to see everything from that point of view. Cervantes wasted his time in showing it from his valiant knight.
You only have to read something meritorious, such as Amancio Ortega's donation of diagnostic imaging equipment, to see who likes it, some hundreds of citizens don't like it. So everyone, in every country is like this. A psychological regression provoked, exploited and maintained on purpose. Trump, Johnson, Salvini and others are playing with the mental health of their populations. Hate the other way round, or that those who have more should pay more, which in fact is already being done, but it is not that: it is about awakening the low passions of hatred and envy with this fallacious proclamation to maintain or conquer power.
The entire scientific, medical, and even mathematical class has come together to find a solution to the virus problem using the scientific method: observation, diagnosis and treatment.. Personally, I am feeling very good when I open my computer and connect to a multitude of congresses, round tables, debates in all medical specialties in Spain. All medical societies come out to share experiences, research and updates at least once a week, including the Royal Academy of Medicine. They really exchange in search of the truth without any cheating that they can see from their speciality, but being aware of their limitation and the seriousness of the problem that requires their union. They do not manipulate, they do not camouflage data, they do not aspire to any prominence. Is it too much to ask that the salaries we pay to parliamentarians serve to bring them closer to any of this? From their obsession with the here-now fight and the next elections, they do not see the seriousness of the problem as the scientists do.
Diagnostic and treatment units have been set up in hospitals, which include all specialties, and the clinical picture of COVID-19 cannot be understood from one of them. Politicians will never do that, some see the opinion of psychologists as a plague.
They have shown their appreciation of the citizen and of health workers. We have seen in the various parliaments "four cats", to prevent their valuable colleagues from being infected while hundreds of health workers sent to work unprotected were infected. Moreover, we have seen how they value the intelligence of the citizen with the information and lies they have fed them.
We poor citizens have another pandemic, but this time a chronic and aggravated one: that of the state of malaise that they and their ilk need to maintain in order to survive.
Politicians have a serious problem: they do not work like scientists. This lack of consensus has produced an emotional regression, which has made the population sick and divided -mainly with the stultifying antipathy of left and right, Franco, etc. -. This division and fragmentation has produced a mental disorder that has affected the population. Even in villages of twenty inhabitants they are divided, but the serious thing is that it has also ended up affecting them more than us, because they have become incapable of thinking about complexities and agreeing on plans for the future. They don't because they don't see the global problem. Like all of us, they see what they campaign for.
Since Sánchez and "company" conquered power, they have dedicated their time to prepare the next elections - with everybody's money - but with the goal of producing an infantile, subordinated, subsidised, regressive, intoxicated society.
We see them detached from the real and complex problems of a convulsed, ruined, despairing society, and unceasing in their fragmenting pre-election hammering. Is it a neurosis or a psychosis? Don't insist, you cannot cure a sick person who does not recognise his illness.. Or who, as in this case, lives at its expense. The free press and editorialists are already useless, and it is useless to write, to try to clarify, it is a sick person who does not listen, who does not declare himself as such. We have no leaders to unify or at least contain the dismemberment of Spain, and the same of USA, UK, Italy, Brazil, etc.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, management training, group and couple therapies