Four Horsemen and a Pack Donkey, by Ricardo Marques (EBA Sociologia - Sociology Jobs and Scholarships /Lusango - Consulting for Development) (Trad: Ana Sofia Baptista)

Four Horsemen and a Pack Donkey, by Ricardo Marques (EBA Sociologia - Sociology Jobs and Scholarships /Lusango - Consulting for Development) (Trad: Ana Sofia Baptista)

In a truncated vision and in the words of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, described in the Book of Revelation, in all our imagery, in everything that these times entail enigmatic and symbolic and where all the projection of scenarios is uncertain. In addition to the symbols of mysticism and what is sociologically mirrored in a reality for which we have not yet woken up.

In our contemporaneity, or in societies that, despite civilizational advancement, order has always lived with chaos, most of which being the same “vacuum” - in everything it can mean in terms of social imbalance, resource distribution, social, gender, racial inequality, between countries, etc. - no matter how many filters and masks we wear, weaknesses have always been structural. Because they are structural, the response capacity of Governments and individuals becomes more complex.

At the heart of this inability, trotting and galloping is metaphor. Four riders and a pack donkey. The hooves of the four horses trot bloodily across the mountainside. At its base, the donkey waits. With eyes fixed on television, it is expected that the peak will be reached. From the mountain or the plateau.

In the oscillation of the curves, but in the violence of the hooves down the slope ...

The plague. However metaphorical, however “Camusian” it is, this Pandemic is this. Like any other disease, "new or old", it does not erase the others. One dies from all, or some, or from the combination of the various. The capacity of an individual is not independent of the responsiveness of his health system (and of its interdependence in social architecture), being the greatest threat to the rupture of that same system, although for many countries, it is not very active or does not exist. Even so, due to the ability and ease of contagion, the unknown in scientific terms, the “cure”, the vaccine (one of these days, in one of that days…) it has rarely, in historical terms, been freely and easily accessible. For which and for whom and in what context?

The society of merit (a fallacious idea in our unequal experiences) risks becoming a society of merit. Who deserves to live? The most useful? The youngest? Those who can live longer?

The hunger. Always omnipresent in most of Africa, Asia, Latin America, but also on the fringes of Europe, the United States, among others. There are those who claim (and it is true) that hunger kills much more than Covid-19. But as in other diseases, as in the four horsemen, hunger is another hallmark of Pandemic.

Those who can not stop working and risk contagion on the streets, or those who stay at home and "helplessly guess" the harmful effects of a fractured socioeconomy. From all quarters, from all classes. In different degrees, immediately, or in the short, medium or long term or in the long term. How many jobs? In a networked socioeconomy, the effects are transversal. Like a house of cards.

The war. Which presupposes conflict, or discord, in societies “liquid”, in Bauman's view, or post and hypermodern, in Lipovetsky's view, but where the majority of the population (particularly in the said West, since in Africa and Asia, sociability networks are stronger in the face of fragile governments) the loneliness of everyday life has been experienced for many decades.

Real loneliness or affection, in the case of the elderly, or the poorest, for example, but fundamentally loneliness of real government policies. Or other loneliness. Loneliness in the middle of the whole and of everything, in a society where everything is consumption and in the long term (in the view of the same Bauman), because we can all be disposable to others. Before everything and the whole and the nothing. “The Being and the Nothing”, as in Sartre's title, but with no place for Camus: where it reads “solitary”, it can and should (also) read “solidary”.

Some say that in the face of a crisis, wars follow. If, on the one hand, this crisis has shown us incredible examples of solidarity, of humanity, it also reveals the most perfidious side of ourselves: of looking at the other as a “stranger”, a potential “contaminated”, a threat, to the exploitation speculative prices, the lack of international agreements, or the mere greed of countries that monopolize resources or do not share them. The logic is the same.

The War feeds on the micro and macro, nationally or internationally. As in the middle of the vacuum, there are still those who speak of concentration camps for the infected, building the stigma of the bell around the neck that lepers of the XIX century were required to transport when approaching a village. If concentration camps already exist in Europe, what are the differences now?

The death. Omnipresent. Some say that the dead of Covid-19 is a drop in the ocean in a world where we are grains of sand. And we are. Although the dialogue of the movie Oldboy, performed by Park Chan-wook, in 2003, is pertinent. After 15 years in prison, locked in a basement, the liberated “anti-hero”, on the destructive path of revenge, meets his captor and confronts him with the reasons for his arrest. These are stingy, like almost all. But, in the face of disbelief, the captor replies: “Both a grain of sand and a rock, both sink in the sea”.

Individualized, personalized, or masked, in every individual's death there is a “social death”. Socially constructed. The theoretical grandparents of Sociology were not mistaken in this analysis.

But Death also has several faces, statistically or symbolically speaking. If we are unable to escape from statistics now (those eyes fixed on the television), from the symbolic much less.

There are those who understand that everything will return to “normality”. There are those who understand that we will build a new society. That is a paradigm shift.

Without certainty in uncertainty. We do not believe that none of the views can be correct or, if both (or none), can cancel each other or live in the uncertainty of a third or fourth or fifth view.

While the four horsemen do not reach the base. In unpredictability, in violence. Or revenge (?)

What interests us is the pack donkey. Listening to the slope near the base. Taking timid and awkward steps, risking climbing the mountain. He knows the knights are on their way. That nothing is a guarantee of nothing. But the grass from which we started is dry.

The pack donkey.

If we are what we carry on our back. If we are the pack donkey itself. We do not know. Only that the mountain is high. And that what we transport is fragile. And that our steps are slow.

Ricardo Marques

EBA Sociologia - Sociology Jobs and Scholarships

Lusango - Consulting for Development