(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.

On a typical pandemic day, Cristóbal stood up on the couch in his underwear, raised his arms and began conducting an imaginary orchestra playing Bellini’s Norma. He had opened the balcony glass door to let the sound alert the neighbourhood of the upcoming performance, and his corgi was rooting around the jasmine plant, looking for a suitable spot to take a leak. He was still a puppy and was not house trained. But Cristóbal, unaware of the current predicament of his potted plants, threw his head back in ecstasy and felt the notes rush through his apartment in unison raising the hair on his back. He jumped around on the couch like a man possessed, his naked chest forward, head back and arms flailing around with purpose. His long and well-groomed beard standing in attention, pointing towards the opposing wall. Exalted, he told himself he would learn Italian during the pandemic, he was too enamoured with the music not to be able to sing it in these frequent shows of planned eccentricity. Naturally, this promise would die off with the thousand other unaccomplished goals that he had made, the one about learning to speak English properly being the most prominent.  As he raised the volume on his state of the art stereo system, he glanced towards the building in front of his, disappointed that the usual onlookers had not come out to watch his performance. There were typically two or three occupied balconies during his weekly performances, people having a drink or a smoke while he put on a show. He continued with his performance for a few more minutes, but the audience never materialized and the show became tiring. Picking up a dense philosophy book that he had meant to read during the lockdown, but had never gotten to, he took a quick photo and tweeted it with the caption; ‘some days are better than others, #philosophy’. He resolved to start reading it the next day, immediately after breakfast.

His apartment was large, three bedrooms, two full bathrooms and an ample balcony that covered the full length of his living room. Cristóbal had purchased it a few years back but had been reluctant about living in Vitacura. He had always felt that his public persona fit better in some old rundown Santiago heritage home, places where the neighbourhood is full of little grocers and butchers, but the idea seemed more attractive than the reality of it. He could not suffer living among the daily barrage of drunken halfwits pissing around his door, the flow of clueless tourists passing through, taking pictures of the surroundings, the loud yelling of the man on a tricycle selling gas tanks or the multitude of loud parties directly vomiting reggaeton onto his ear until the early hours in the morning. He loved taking photographs of these places, but, as he had told multiple friends and acquaintances, they remained the romantic places that should not be revealed for the disaster that they truly are, a sort of valley of suffering that looked like a place where poetry was written, but if you put your ear close enough, you would only hear coughing and the occasional sound of a colic baby crying.

Cristóbal was not particularly intelligent, neither was he particularly creative, but he had, with the help of his family and some well-placed friends, made a career in photography and journalism, and was someone to whom people generally had to listen if they were to be liked by the multitudes. He reveled in the attention and was generally unaware that he was mostly out of place in conversations of an intellectual nature.  Often, when he was assigned the task of interviewing some sort of expert, the other party was typically annoyed at having to answer sophomoric questions posed with the certainty of a cretin. However, Cristóbal remained oblivious, and few were the days when he paused to understand what came out of his bearded mouth or what the conversation was really about. The only consistency, the only thing that he knew he could not overlook lest he become a pariah, was questioning received or establishment wisdom. He had staked out his spot of real estate in the Chilean public space, and that was the anti-establishment artist who reluctantly enters the public arena, having to give up precious art-related time for the greater good. He had learned that a well-placed sigh or lament about how much he was losing by not concentrating on his photography was as good as gold. It transmitted to the world the artist as sacrificial lamb, the fragile becoming robust to fight the devil, for the devil must be furiously fought. Fortunately, Cristóbal had enough influence to point at anything and call it the devil, and then engage in a life and death battle with the unfortunate object of his arbitrary rage. Some people had pointed this tactic out and complained that he was not particularly well suited to take on any of the subjects under his scrutiny. These objections were infrequent, and they tended to come from the margins, as most people knew that an attack on Cristóbal could end up putting a target on your back. As we mentioned earlier, Cristóbal was not particularly intelligent, neither had he any firm grasp of anything remotely technical, but, in his infinite irony, God had placed him in Chile, where his ilk prospers easily with the support of a wealthy family, an overbearing mother, a sufficiently powerful father, and a newspaper editor who needs some help with an overdue debt. Cristóbal was not worried about these little details, these were facts that in no way diminished his merit, they were obstacles that must be overcome for the world to bask in the greatness that was his being.

The pandemic had taken all of this away, like an overzealous parent taking a teenager’s laptop as punishment for overindulging in masturbation. Naturally, Cristóbal thought of the world as a place where events happened to him first, and then rippled outwards. His father knew this and secretly hated his wife for having nurtured such a little sociopath, but he was aware that there was no way back; the little egomaniac had already been molded and he must not be allowed to fall, there was no amount of love or money that could put his astronomical ego back together. So Cristóbal survived on a powerful cocktail of slight imbecility, lack of self-awareness, powerful parents and a country excessively tolerant of silliness. In one of his latest escapades, one that had made his father avoid his friends for a week, he had openly declared war on all economists that continued to support an independent Central Bank, raising, what to him seemed like foolproof objections, but to anyone with any knowledge would appear like the ramblings of a spoiled child. He had no particular understanding of the subject involved, but he knew, with his under-the-average intellect, that once he asked the question, a series of intellectuals would have to take his silly inquiries seriously, since there was enough of a mass of people that, having heard the question asked by him, would also demand an answer. His father had chided Cristóbal for making a fool of himself by engaging in things he did not understand, but our clueless warrior had no time for reasonable objections. It was a basic scheme, and it worked wonders for the man. Cristóbal had intuited that Chile was angry at something, and asking contrarian questions with self-satisfied airs and an accusatory tone was tonic for his popularity. Understanding the subject at hand was unnecessary and even a net negative, since details were boring and tended to turn people off. So his strategy was to keep asking seemingly simple but “demolishing” questions and watch the ‘serious people’ contort themselves in trying to answer them. This made him feel powerful, a man of gravitas, someone with whom the world had to contend, and not a second rate journalist whose existence was a bug in the system.

Having exhausted the morning opera routine, he settled down on his desk, opened the laptop and started writing down the weekend’s column. For completeness, we include the full content of the column, abundantly aware that no one deserves this kind of punishment. However, we will allow ourselves a few comments between paragraphs in order to facilitate the full enjoyment of the column. In the end we want you to be as entertained as we were:

                                    The tyranny of numbers

For months we have withstood the pandemic, hunkered down in our small apartments with only our pets for company. As I write this, my new puppy is staring at me from the balcony, confused as to why I have not left my apartment other than to walk him. We are at the precipice of a global phenomenon that will alter our lives forever, a fact that future generations, if there are any, will write volumes about. It is oppressive, this virus has done to us what no dictatorship could; it has locked our doors, emptied our streets, closed our shops and forced us to smile at each other through computer screens, an unnatural and unpleasant exercise.  But today I will not write about the pandemic and its oppressive threat. Instead I will write about another tyranny, the oppressive tyranny of numbers, exercised by those who wish to drown the human spirit in facts and figures, as if we’re nothing but walking statistics. I have spent the last few weeks looking at different sets of numbers, new infections, deaths, contagion rate, R₀.

 (Cristóbal had struggled with this concept for weeks, he knew it was something to do with infections but had abandoned any attempt at understanding it. It was however a useful inclusion, for most of his followers held him in such high regard that they would immediately assume he was the foremost authority on the subject. If anyone ever asked, he could simply change the subject and move on, life is easy when you’re blessed.)

No numbers can, in their cold and unfeeling state, reflect the nature of our world. We kiss, love, embrace, give birth and die, like so many have done before us, and many others will, after we’re gone. And yet, dear readers, the world is presented to us through numbers, decimals and percentages, as if those little marching soldiers are the embodiment of humanity. Well, to this I say enough, enough of these little dictators pretending to tell us all that we need to know about ourselves. Enough of the daily parade of numbers and statistics with its need for validation and devotion, enough of the so called experts who tell us that life can indeed be measured and quantified. Enough! I for one am tired of these cruel and petty tyrants.

(Cristóbal had had previous issues with basic arithmetic, this was well known to his parents. However his mother had attributed this uncomfortable truth to a learning disorder, and had demanded that the private school where little Cristóbal had been a student, give him extra time to take his exams and homework. His mathematics teacher had once quipped: “Cristóbal no es mas tonto porque no nació mas temprano”, which had gotten said teacher in some hot water. Nonetheless he had graduated high school and gone on to Catolica, as was preordained.)

As our brothers and sisters joined hands and marched down Plaza Dignidad to demand their dignity, they did not ask for numbers, they asked for love, a state that supports them in every aspect of their lives and that will raise them up, not ignore them. We demanded our rights and what did they give us? More numbers. Experts came out on television and told us that GDP grew by this many percent, inequality fell by this much and that the middle class grew by this many. Just numbers, that’s all they have. I ask you my dear readers, can they measure our frustration, can they measure our dignity, can they, with their computers and artificial intelligence, measure our love? They cannot and will not, because they know, deep down that our collective cry is one of the soul and not of the brain. We are conscious beings that demand to be treated as such.

(One of the experts that Cristóbal was referring to had objected that the state cannot, almost by definition, take charge of the individual’s mood. It is a calculating entity, and that public goods do not include joy or love; at most, the state can commit to not preventing you from pursuing them yourself. During said conversation, Cristóbal had smirked and retorted: “And there is the problem, my friend, you see the state as an object, and I see it as a mother holding a baby”. The expert had left the conversation quite confused.)

We are many, not in numbers but in conscience. Our bodies are separated by the physical world, but our hearts and minds are united in our search for meaning and dignity. There are no mountains we can’t climb and no difficulties we can’t overcome with the power of our joy and love. This is what we can achieve as one, as brothers and sisters that have told the universe: “you cannot dictate to us how the world works with your vulgar numbers, away with you, cruel logic”. We demand that you try to understand us, individually and not as a crowd, we are not just masses of people moving through your excel spreadsheets, waiting for some formula to be applied to our individual cells. We are multidimensional, complex and demand to be treated as such.

(You may notice, dear reader, that this is highly repetitive and devoid of content. This is no accident, our Cristóbal does not produce content, he produces paragraphs that feel like content. If you read his whole column and were asked to reproduce its central thesis a few hours afterwards, the most you will be able to say is: “Feelings matter” or a variant thereof. This is not to say that feelings are unimportant, but it seems to us that they should remain entirely in the private realm. Cristóbal had been told this multiple times by a variety of reasonable people, but he refused to back down, his was a revolutionary stance to be defended against the assault of reason.

Our awakening has not been understood by the powers that be, or worse yet, it cannot be understood by the multitude of serious men in tailored suits. They have been blinded by their own pettiness and mediocrity. We give them a universal truth and they look in their little binders for a definition, we beat our chest and show our wounds in unison and they turn on their computers to tweak the model. They cannot understand what we are asking for, and it is our duty to make them understand. It is our duty to tear up their numerical façade, bring down the empire of numbers, undo their precious logic and demand, once and for all, our place in this land of ours. Those comrades who stood out there, in the sun, demanding dignity, do not need lectures but action. What they showed us is the poetry of what we can accomplish when our souls act as one, when our fists rise above our heads punching the sky and, when together we shout: “Dignity”

(We are fully aware that this has begun to sound like the ramblings of a man who needs 1000 words for the column. Bear with us, there are only a few words left)

                        In the interest of space I will conclude my lament for our numericized world, but only because, as always, I am limited to 1000 words, again the tyranny of numbers rears its ugly head. But for those who doubt it, none is free from these devilish handcuffs, and no one can escape unless we come together to break these chains. We are better than this, we can do better than this, we can demand much more than this from those that consider themselves our betters. This is not about me as an individual, this is about us, about our sense of self, about the worker who wakes up in the morning and feels like the world has let him down, about the little child who goes to school and is told he must retake his mathematics class because he is failing, about a system that does not understand freedom unless it is quantified by some cog who has forgotten his long lost humanity. We are free because we are born free, we are loved because we are born in love. I will not bind myself to the tyranny of numbers, I will not allow myself to be limited by their dictates. I choose, my fellow citizens of this small country at the edge of this crazy world, to write this essay with exactly 1001 words.

                                                                                                            Cristóbal K

(He thought this little rebellion was particularly poignant, that extra word being the first salvo in the new revolution to follow. The rather banal truth was that the 1000 word cut-off was more of a suggestion than a firm rule.)

Our Cristóbal did a quick word count and was happy with the result. This was going to awaken the souls of the downtrodden, he was certain of it. He was amazed at the speed with which he produced the column, it was not even lunch time and there he was, about to send a finished product to his editor. He reread the whole thing from the beginning, and as he finished the last paragraph he was filled with a sense of proper accomplishment, his fingers trembled with excitement and he felt, without exaggeration, that the world was now a bit better. These were not the ramblings of a fevered ego infecting the world with inane platitudes, no sir, these were the words that would bring down the whole rotten edifice of cowardice.

            Having accomplished such a meaningful and intellectually orgasmic task, Cristóbal prepared a quick lunch. He took out a big slice of brie cheese (cost 5000 CLP per 100 gr) a couple of slices of jamón de bellota (approximate cost 200 Euros per kg, he did not remember the exact price, he had purchased it in Barcelona prior to the lockdown), a nice baguette and a nice bottle of Argentinian Malbec (this was relatively inexpensive, Argentinian wines could be bought for a song in Mendoza). Lunch was fabulous and he watched a few YouTube videos of Slavoj Zizek that a friend had sent him the night before. It was something to do with bathrooms, he resolved to employ the concept in one of his columns. After lunch he took a quick siesta, tweeted something about the beauty of still life and teased his readers about the new column coming during the weekend. Having accomplished this, he settled in with that book about the history of central banking that an expert had recommended.

A phone call from Max, his old Tabancura friend and current writer in residence at a think tank saved him from the hell that he was voluntarily going through. Happy to have escaped, he picked up the phone and, without failing to mention the book he was reading, Cristóbal settled in for a long conversation:

M: How are you weon?

C: Ok, reading a book on central banking, fascinating stuff.

M: Yeah, I also find the stuff interesting, I think this stuff is much simpler than people make it out to be

C: Definitely, it seems like the system is built to obfuscate its true nature. They do not want people to know the truth, hiding behind jargon so that we remain blind to the neoliberal lies they tell us.

M: Yes, this is obvious to anyone willing to look hard enough. The two of us maybe the only ones in this country that are pursuing this crusade, the rest remain silent, content in their wilful ignorance. It infuriates me to see so many academics with supposedly impeccable credentials trying to impede our work.

C: We must stay strong brother, this is la lucha eterna, trying to bring light were there is darkness, clarity where there is confusion.

M: Yes, I was saying this to a colleague yesterday, with every step we take they tremble, the powers that be. They are running scared Cristóbal, they know that their days are really numbered, this country is forever changed.

At this point we must note dear reader that this conversation sounds contrived and false, a figment of the documenter’s imagination. We are in no way embellishing or even slightly changing either the tone or the content of this conversation. Some illustrious experts have termed this potent combination of ignorance and bravado, the Dunning-Krueger effect, we refer to it simply as the churning of unexceptional minds or, as some in our group have insisted, the flatulent discharge of blank thought. There has been strong disagreement within the group as to the proper term for such empty palaver, but we must not derail our account of precious Cristóbal.

C: You know what Max? Today I was thinking the same thing, and I was remembering the day both of us were assaulted by those flaites near Plaza Dignidad, remember?

M: Like it was yesterday. What made you think of it?

C: Well, do you think our encounter that day was a coincidence?

M: I don’t know, I thought it was strange at the time.

C: Me too. That’s why I was thinking about it today. After I wrote my weekly column, I thought to myself; “If I were a part of the government, and I had this eloquent journalist throwing arrows of light into my intentional darkness and unmasking all of my nefarious plans, what would I do?” And the first thing I thought of was our encounter with those flaites that punched us while we left the plaza. It was a very odd coincidence, don’t you think?

M: Very odd, I remember that we were simply going on our way, and this group of Colo Colo fans just surrounded us, calling us cuicos quliaos and tugging at your scarf. I felt intimidated and scared at the time, but I just thought they were drunk trash bothering whoever did not wear a Colo jersey.

C: So did I, at the time. But then I started thinking about this with more distance and calm, don’t you think it was strange that they zeroed in on the two of us? Wasn’t that odd? I mean, there were hundreds of people on that street that day, why us?

If our illustrious reader had seen our two heroes that day, the incident would have been self-explanatory. A group of somewhat drunk young men had encountered two dandies in the street, gesturing with extreme animation, using non-popular parlance with a delicate accent to describe the anger and the frustration of “the people”. Being part of said people, they had disliked the two gentlemen, and, in their drunken stupor, had decided to harass these alien creatures that seemed so animated and preoccupied. They had first approached our Cristóbal, he seemed the more effeminate of the two, wearing a white blazer and a rose coloured scarf and had begun to mock his accent, his affectations and manner of speech. Max, displeased with such unseemly displays of aggression, had told them, in no uncertain terms, that he would give them a stern talking to. The largest among them, the one that also seemed like the leader of the group, had immediately proceeded to punch poor Max, right on his left cheek, and Max’s glasses had flown a smooth parabola right onto a passing car. Indignant, Cristóbal had tried to intervene, but another chap of similar strength had also punched our reluctant hero in the stomach, an act that had caused Cristóbal to double over in pain. While the two poor souls gathered their wits, the group had robbed everything worth robbing; wallets, cellphones and other knickknacks that were easily pulled off our subjugated intellectuals. It had indeed been a humiliating experience, but for our two unfortunate souls, it had been doubly crushing; they were only trying to bring light onto this damned twisted world, and the world had stared back with violence. The simple truth of the matter is that their egos could not accept random occurrences, especially ones that resulted in them looking like weak schmucks taken for a quick ride by street hoodlums. There must be some meaning to this, some deeper significance, some higher power holding the strings. Coincidence was the playground of weaker minds. For Cristóbal and Max, who, given their complicated personal issues, believed they thought on a more elevated plane, there were darker forces and invisible threads to be invented. So our dim lights continued to weave a conspiracy that left their egos intact.

M: Hmmm, I had not thought about this dear Cristóbal, I think you may be right. And now that I think of it, this happened right after you had written that great column about neoliberal fascism and its connection to unwanted pregnancies and I had written that scathing piece about the male genitalia as the guiding light of the current government, remember?

C: Ah yes, yes my dear friend, now I remember. Those two columns were retweeted thousands of times. Some neoliberal hack even came on TV to label us ridiculous for finding spurious connections. Ah, it all makes sense now old chap, it is clear as day.

M: There it is my friend, we have been lazy in dismissing that day as a simple assault. Even the two of us, as clearheaded as we can be, sometimes forget that the forces of darkness lurk in every corner. We have to admit that our dismissal of this incident was simplistic and lacked foresight.

C: Asi es, it is so easy to get tangled into the day to day, even for us, that one forgets that there is rhyme and reason to it all.

They continued to chat for a while longer, weaving a complicated web of silliness that would have eventually involved Donald Trump, had it not been for their weak grasp of facts and logic and the simple quotidian details of meetings and other tasks to be completed. After hanging up with Max, Cristóbal felt a sense of accomplishment. He had, in his dimwitted way, fit another completely unrelated piece of information into his convoluted story, like a toddler fitting a square peg into a round hole. But he had remained the protagonist, and that dear reader, is the only purpose to these types of exercises. After a long and boring meeting with the rest of the staff at the newspaper and some quick one on ones with some other friends, our Cristóbal retired to the living room, where, after a dinner of sushi and sashimi, ordered from his favourite Japanese restaurant, he proceeded to watch some Netflix and drink a glass of wine, comfortable in the Popular Design couch that hugged him like a kangaroo’s pouch. He slept early that night, the next day would be full of new adventures.

Here we leave our hero, not because of some odd notion of restraint or parsimony. There really isn’t much more to the story, there are no further complications or deeper layers of thought to be explored. Our Cristóbal is rather simple, and, were we to relate further days of his life, we are plenty certain that you, dear reader, would flip the page with scorn. The story would be redundant and morose, the comic novelty wearing thin after the second or third day. It is not that Cristóbal does not do or say funny things, it is that, after a while, those funny things remind one of the multitude of zealous egos that litter our path to salvation. It is a comic story that can turn tragic if repeated. We try, in our ant like ways, to contribute to the world, adding a tiny piece here and there, spending a whole lifetime with trial and error. But amongst us there are these Cristóbals, who enter our collective consciousness like bulls in a China shop and, looking for the fabled mirror that makes them look like square jawed, barrel chested heroes, break all that we have built piece by piece. They do not answer to reason but to narcissism, their beastly need for constant adulation is deadly because, once they have convinced enough of us that they indeed know how to achieve our salvation, it is nearly impossible for them to climb down from that horse. It is quite unfair to end our story on such an unpleasant note, but comical as he may be, Cristóbal is a dangerous mix of vapid and pernicious, he pulls us to diagonally different purposes, pollutes our souls and appeals to the demons of our existence. Life can be difficult to make sense of, and these characters make it damn near impossible to sift through the wreckage they leave behind. But, in the meanwhile, they tend to be entertaining.

Raul Barahona-Svartz

Santiago, 30 December, 2020

PS: Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.