Tetra Ciklina

Aphorisms and loose ends – Part 2

Part 1 here.

1. The communist party that wasn’t.

Leaving Chile

We decided to leave Chile after ten years of living here. I wrote down some of my impressions of the last four years, things I have thought about and will continue to chew on for a while. I don’t claim any sort of expertise, so this is just a collection of observations from some foreigner who lived in Santiago for a decade. I am sure that, with time, I will have been wrong on at least 20% of what I wrote, and I will view writing about Chile as a way to update my priors. I thought this would be a short piece, but it got really long so I decided to split it into three parts.

Part 1 (below) is my way of trying to understand the role that a section of civil society played in the estallido.

Part 2 is a collection of things I learned from the estallido.

Part 3 (still to come) is a couple of personal anecdotes that taught me a lot about the institutional fracture that the estallido provoked.

As a note, I keep using the word estallido instead of the english translation (revolt) because I find it more appropriate for Chilean purposes and I really like it.

Anatomy of a Revolt – Part 1

This is the second time I witness a popular uprising of such a massive scale. The first was in my native home, Albania, when I was 14 years old. I can say without exaggeration that my first experience was much more as a willing and passionate participant, while during my second time around, in Chile, I was a more neutral observer. (more…)

The Venezuela Update Index (vui)

We don’t like to change or update our beliefs, even when presented with evidence that contradicts them. However, there are differences on how costly it is to do so for each person. Whatever the fundamental reason, there seems to be a lot of heterogeneity in how costly it is for each one of us to update. It is likely that extreme experiences increase the cost of updating. For example, the direct involvement of the US government in establishing right-wing military juntas in Latin America may have (rightly, at least at the time) formed a strong belief among left-leaning people that any US involvement is in itself undesirable. Or, conversely, that any system that is opposed to the US is in itself good and desirable.

Maco

(You can read the other two stories here and here. There is some continuity between the last story and this one. )

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Maco sat on the bathroom floor ruffled. The positive pregnancy tests lay strewn all around, mocking her from the floor, as if to thumb their nose at her independence. “I’m pregnant– she thought – and I live in fucking Lastarria.” Everyone in her life had raved indignantly when she had told them she was moving there; for most of them anywhere beyond Tobalaba was a land of monsters and dragons, where norms of polite society suddenly disappeared and the law of the jungle reigned unencumbered. Her mother had cried when told, and her father had refused to support her ‘idiotic juvenile behaviour’. But she did not put much stock in their objections, this was another one of those Chilean pastimes that had gotten rather tiresome; ‘the living among the rotos alarm’ of the well-heeled. Plus her mother had shed equally fervent tears when Maco had chosen Catolica over Universidad de los Andes for her undergraduate studies, same for her refusal to study law, ditto for her insistence on dedicating herself to photography. This had all been played according to some pre-written book of Chilean clichés that her kind passed down to each generation, since time immemorial. 

Conflict Theorists and Scammers

image: @copyright S Gross

I have been trying to understand the worldview of the people who are on their way to change Chile. In some sense I wanted to go beyond left/right divides, trying to understand the fundamental model of the world that Chileans of different camps have in their heads. I don’t really think that intelligence alone can explain such a large gap in how people view the world. There are plenty of intelligent people who make outlandish claims; scientists who claim the world is 6000 years old (or at least believe it), economists who claim increasing demand will not increase prices when supply is limited, or in general people who have spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand the world and then make claims that plainly contradict their own training. I have found that this happens in Chile with some frequency, and I was a bit lost in the fog, trying to fit this into some model that is not simply ideological. 

Carlos

(I’ve been sent another)

Carlos ordered a bottle of wine immediately after taking his seat. He took off his mask and flashed a knowing smile at his bejeweled wife. She followed suit and leaned over the table, her bracelets ringing as if to remind him of the odd social convention of wearing shiny objects to distract from boredom. He pursed his lips, thinking that he must have had this unpleasant reminder a million times, each time being more unbearable. His wife was a perfectly decent looking woman, her fifty years holding up a solidly build frame. Her wrinkles grew perfectly symmetric on the sides of her mouth, her bare arms still firm and her chest wide and smooth. And yet Carlos felt a sense of restiveness about her. She was a perfectly adequate partner but her chatter had become unbearable lately. She would drone on about minute details of information that had no content, she was either slowly losing her intellect or she really never had it but he had been incapable of surmising.

Cristóbal

(A friend of mine sent me this and I found it worth sharing)

Dear reader, what follows is a day in the life of Cristóbal K, a man of means and standing in Chilean society. He is a photographer and journalist of some repute, and since Chileans are fascinated with this bearded wonder, we, the envious and cynical, bring you a small snippet of  his daily routine. This is not meant to engross the reader, our purpose is to entertain by providing a small account of the factory that produces so many forgettable thoughts and opinions. We would also like to remind our unlucky reader that this is but a day in the life of an utterly unremarkable man, his own opinion of himself notwithstanding, and as such it must be swallowed rather than chewed, the latter requiring a level of depth that our hapless character does not, unfortunately, possess.

Underestimating Jadue

It feels like Chile is sleep-walking into a communist presidency, with every rejection of the status quo, communism seems to become more acceptable, or less alarming, to a larger fraction of Chileans. Maybe not sleep-walking exactly, maybe it’s a convulsion into a communist presidency, but either way, the final destination seems to be a good probability that Daniel Jadue will actually be president. After the last elections, and the round rejection of the right and centre left, I strongly revised my beliefs about the probability of a Jadue win, to somewhere between 30-40%. In my view, most Chileans, including friends of mine that are actually opposed to Jadue or any other communist on matter of principle, seem to be a bit too nonchalant about him winning the presidency. They think it will never happen, their argument seems to be that no one really likes communists in Chile and they have never had that much support. I think they are wrong, and, as with any random negative outcome, they downplay both the probability of it occurring, and its cost. That is to say, people who have some sort of bias towards the status quo, not in terms of preferences but in terms of expectations, significantly downplay the risk of a negative outcome. In plain English; most Chileans think that there is a low probability that Jadue will win, and, even if he wins, it won’t be that bad.

La obsesión con el crecimiento

Es difícil filtrar el ruido del actual clima político en el país. La fuerte polarización y el retroceso del centro, dentro del sistema de partidos chileno, hacen que un acuerdo entre las partes involucradas sea menos probable y el conflicto casi una certeza. A menudo, las críticas constructivas son más difíciles de emprender en dicho entorno, donde los extremos simplemente se insultan entre sí. Sin embargo, estas críticas  son importantes por la importancia de un terreno común. En el espíritu de mi nuevo deseo de ser positivo, eché un vistazo más de cerca a un ensayo de Noam Titelman titulado: “No siempre es la economía, estúpido!“. Desde tiempo atrás que me gusta este texto porque también considero que lo sucedido en Chile, durante el estallido social, es más que sólo economía. Intenté dar una explicación no económica en Enero. Para resumir rápidamente, las opiniones sobre el contexto histórico chileno son un fuerte precedente  de cómo la población se desplaza hacia los extremos del espectro político . Ambos campos tienen una narrativa muy diferente sobre lo que sucedió en los últimos 30 años. Entonces, cuando comencé a leer el artículo de Titelman, ya estaba de acuerdo con su propuesta .

The Growth Obsession

It is difficult to sift through the noise in the current Chilean political climate. The strong polarization and the retreat of the Chilean political centre are making agreement less likely and conflict an almost certainty. I realize that constructive critiques are often harder to undertake in such an environment, where extremes just lob insults at each other, but they are important because the value of common ground is high at this point. In the spirit of my newfound desire for a positive contribution, I took a longer look at an essay by Noam Titelman entitled: “It’s not always the economy, stupid”. I have a strong prior to liking this article, because I also think that a lot of what happened in Chile during the estallido is more than just economics. I tried my hand at giving a non-economic based explanation in January. To quickly summarize, views of the Chilean historical context are a strong predictor of how people sift into left and right in Chile. Both sides have a very different narrative as to what happened in the last 30 years. So when I started reading Titelman’s piece, I was already in agreement with the general sentiment.