Recuperemos as mans / Reclaiming our hands

So-called human civilization, the culture to which we belong, is based on the predominance of Reason over emotions, of Ideas over nature.

Through mythology we can show the beginnings of this tragic dictate. When Marduk - the word - exiled the Babylonian mother goddess Tiamat, the control of word over matter began and, in parallel fashion, that of man over woman.

“In the beginning was the Word,” says the Bible, thus symbolizing the power of speech and creation through magic, taking away woman’s ability to create.

Anthropology showed how mother goddesses and the little figures that represent women were supplanted by phalluses. At the same time as artisanal representations - potters, blacksmiths - in ceramics were replaced by mythological representations.

The power over women held by men is produced parallel to the triumph of magic over nature, of the conceptual over matter, and for the same reasons.

From that time on, the word, and then writing, constituted elements of power for those who would marginalize the population not trained in the use of the word and writing, not educated in the use of abstract generalizations. The gift of language was used in agoras, tribunes, and pulpits as a weapon of differentiation for an ignorant multitude. The surprise of what is often called “the masses” (something malleable and soft) regarding the language skill continues to be so strong that excess verbiage is still a powerful weapon for the use of manipulation of all sorts and in every system, especially democratic ones in which, as we know, speaking is allowed.

Except for the Pre-Socratic philosophers, who analyzed the reasons for things based on personal experiences, all philosophies will be based on the discrediting of these experiences. “The philosophers of Mileto had the new idea of trying to explain natural phenomena - including human nature - without any supernatural intervention,” explains Farrington. The religious philosophy begun by Pythagoras, in which mathematics kept the souls of the adept outside the terrain of the material, was reinforced by the social change of a people who, with the growth of slavery, looked down on manual labor.

The forge, welding, pottery, cloth dyeing, and all the different industrial processes from which the Pre-Socratics deduced their materialistic philosophical interpretations, were scorned in favor of a clean, aristocratic thought: the theory of Pythagorean numbers. Numbers are clear and aseptic like the divinity itself. In this way, Einstein, the wise mathematician of our time, could combine his advanced theories with his Zionist beliefs.

Mathematics, after so many centuries, still are the focus of the religious fervor of their followers and, like a numerical theology, appear obscure and inaccessible for the majority of people. The failures of students in this discipline are a good proof of this.

Later the ineffable Plato appears in the foreground of the philosophical scene, a status he won’t lose during the whole Philosophical Representation of History, although at times he might seem to occupy a secondary role. In general, philosophy up to our time is seasoned with Platonism.

Plato proclaims that “Truth is in the Idea.” In this way it offers the theory of the division of labor to economic science. Some think and others work. Each one has a specific role. But leaving it very clear that the credit for the result of the labor belongs to the one who had the idea and not the one who did the work.

Always at the expense of some anonymous beings who do the manual labor, we see the beginning of the importance of the Seated Sage ideologues. Platonic theory includes the justification for en entire culture based on exploitation, which is thus perpetuated up to our day.

In ancient societies, the act of creation had feminine characteristics and not only in the basic creation of human beings, but rather in the rest of the arts. Medicine, pottery, weaving, agriculture etc. were typically carried out by women. It was a material culture. Platon tried to make it all-encompassing, assigning this character to everything, from astronomy to all natural phenomena. In contrast to materialism there were the myths, the gods, the alienation of the supernatural. Abstract mathematics is imposed on concrete technique.

This key fact in the history of thought changed the direction of history. From then on scientific hypotheses were silenced and their spread was interrupted unless they had religious go ahead. The atomic theory of Democritus, which dates from 420 B.C., had to wait until the 17th century of our era to be baptized by the church. To achieve that, it was necessary to link the materialistic theory of atoms to divine creation.

Platonism did not consist of the transmission of practical knowledge but rather of esoteric, artificial, and knowledge that is not based on any form of empiricism or reasoning. It’s simply a means of control. Materialist philosophers were accused of “rejecting the divine and substituting it with irrational causes, blind force, and the rule of necessity". We would have to wait many centuries for Jacques Monod to write Chance and Necessity with the proper scientific rigor.

The materialist philosophers were Ionians. We know that communities of women led a happy existence on those islands of Asia Minor. The philosophers of Asia Minor are exponents of a concept of life derived from these communities that were violently destroyed. Plato, in contrast, is the first and greatest ideologue of patriarchy and states that Order predominates over difference, God over matter, the Abstract over the concrete, and the Spirit over the Flesh. We women are the flesh, we are the material, the earth, nature. Platonismo imposed Divine Reason, immutable, immobile, regular and unique in opposition to reasoning based on empiricism and the transformation of nature with one’s own hands. It only comes to accept astronomy when it discovers that the Sun, the Moon, and the wandering planets - what fear disorder always produces - move in a regular manner, as is befitting their divinity.

The philosophy of the “logos,” of rationality, founded on a logical principle of identity, is that majestic and idealistic phantom developed by Plato and installed in all the West over a period of two thousand years, a classist and unjust philosophy that rejects all madness, all abnormality, every desire for difference in general. In opposition to the single Reason installed in the system, we women claim the right to difference.

The tyranny of the “Platonic logos” and subsequent philosophy, is the tyranny of the personal, of which is singular: God, Man, Reason, Subject, etc. The transformation we should achieve consists of substituting the Singular with the plural, the Subject with collectivity and personal possession with communism.

We must recognize that Marxism didn’t escape the errors of that secular philosophy. Marxism is expressed through general concepts like Nature, History, Subject, etc. or in the form of values: Communism, kingdom of Freedom, etc. Things that will fall from the sky in the future, after the proletariat takes power. In this way, it’s simple to explain. We women have developed, now, as a material relationship, what Marxism puts forth as forms of philosophical values. We aren’t waiting for a hypothetical future in order to question the relationships between individuals, the sexual revolution, the right to control one’s own body, the liberation from nature or communism in people’s private lives. With the destruction of the patriarchal society and the idealistic and elitist concepts on which it is based, we can inaugurate a more coherent and natural society, without the existence of the division of labor and one in which manual labor is valued at the same level as the intellectual kind. This will not be possible as long as the individual family exists in which children receive the cultural norms and abilities of their parents that will determine their future. The family is the best means of social stratification and division of labor and can only be ended by women who suffer from it.

The general faith in myths, said Plato, demonstrates that you can make the people believe what you want. The legislator has to consider the belief that can provide the most advantages. According to the two dictates, we see how when traditional “religious values” no longer have credibility they are substituted by others, perhaps parapsychological, and when certain political doctrines are outdated it’s necessary to change methods and use words like “Democracy” or “Freedom” as myths in order to calm the impulses for popular justice. In any case it is necessary to impose an ideological superstructure that can affect the thinking of the exploited. A large part of art, literature, music, and song was used for ideological imposition throughout history. Thus art was monolithic and patriarchal. Plato put forth the theory of the complete exclusion of originality in art. He affirmed that the Egyptians had created an art of stereotypes and asked: “why can’t we do the same thing? Today, the so-called “socialist art” continues those Platonic guidelines.

The disrespect for manual labor is produced as a consequence of the growth in the number of slaves. The disparaging attitude already appears in the fifth century A.C. and starting in the fourth century BCE, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle rationalize it and give it social coherence. In their “ideal “ philosophical constructions they deny privileges at artisans because their activity “is servile and unworthy of a free man.” Aristotle advises leaving working the land to slaves.

The division of labor, without a doubt, influences the progress of science, in the sense that it facilitates thinking and reflecting for a leisure class, but it also allows for theorizing without taking the facts of reality into account. Science thus becomes an instrument for power over others. The ruling class always has arguments for power over those nature really transforms.

The negative consequences of scientific progress that creates theory can be seen in all walks of life, in social inequality, ecological disaster, in wars and in the lack of harmony in an unhappy world.

The division of labor achieved its best achievements and historical results in the marginalization of women, when they reserved the role of mothers and domestic chores for us. We women continue our concern for materials while the Seated Sages think and decide, very poorly in fact, the course of the world. “Behind every great man there was always a great woman,” an institutionalized phrase, shows that women, in the background, make sacrifices so that the thinkers, artists, politicians, scientists, etc. carry out their great work.

According to Glotz, it was the genius Plato who developed a theory of the division of labor for economic science for the first time. We women are the ones most affected by the theory and, as such, the most interested in destroying that division in order to reach those beings who, as Lenin said, “will know how to do it all.”

Today, the division of labor reaches high levels of specialization. It’s a question of having human beings specialize, that is, of reducing their capacity as much as possible. As history advances - as it “progresses” they say - we people become less familiar with the material world, from the physical reality that surrounds us (we can be utterly ignorant regarding the flora and fauna of our region and know, in contrast, facts about our antipodes) and even our own vital process, since only the wizard-doctors have access to knowledge of our body and how it functions. From the disdain for manual labor we proceed to the disdain for the body and the attack on the senses. “If at some point we can know something completely, we must have a free body and consider the true reality only with the concept of the soul… While we are alive, we are closer to knowledge if we avoid, insofar as we are able, the exchange and communication with the body…” “Things must be learned through reason and intelligence and not by sight.” In these phrases of Plato we see how the senses are scorned. Vision, touch, and hearing are useless. The important thing is abstract intelligence. All sensory activity is marginalized and with it all practical contact if beings with reality. Platonic theory rejects all links between thought and practice, in order to look down on the latter. Not only does he look down on the intellectual worth of technicians, their reputation as inventors, but he also denies they possess scientific truths in the art of making things.

The Greeks, who advised thinkers to distance themselves from mind from all bodily contact, handed the respected patrimony to Christians. “If your eye or your tongue are a cause of sin, rip them out,” says Christianity. Christian theory abhors the corrupted Flesh, its sensuality.

All western civilization is built following the criteria that dictates the value given to the Idea, the Spirit, Order, Reason, and Logic of the smart and fancy Seated Sages. The entire system follows this logic. Centralization is an idea of Order, patriarchal; decentralization pertains to freedom. The men of order, the bureaucrats, administrators, bourgeoisie… have an atrophied creative freedom to change the workd. A certain amount of order leads to efficacy, but today humanity needs freedom, intuition, in order to imagine a new form of relationship, behavior, propriety, progress. Order becomes more necessary in large organizations, a product of centralism and capitalism. But it also transforms these into something dead and sclerotic. In small organizations and small countries order concedes space to creative freedom.

We have made Reason king over sentiment and nature, and Logic is the supreme technique. The Greek word sophia, which means “technical skill,” comes to mean abstract speculation.

Subsequently, the Seated Sages invented the machine to save us that would eventually take the place of human labor and free us. But magic robots are products of wishful thinking and in truth the machine did not substitute human labor. Factories are still full of female and male workers creating manufactured products. The housewife, surrounded by appliances, is still hard at work all day, cleaning madly, and spends as much time on domestic chores as when there were no machines.

The machine doesn’t do away with manual labor. Rather, it deprives us of feeling pride in the result of our work and of feeling like we are the creators and masters of that work.

Those doing physical labor are now at the service of the machine; housewives at the service of appliances, without any creative possibility. In this way the machines, far from being at the service of the workers, take advantage of the dominant economic system.

The growth in the appliance industry clearly explains the meaning of the development of productive forces. They aren’t produced in relation to the progressive liberation of women, but rather to benefit private capitalist accumulation. The domestic apparatuses become modern instruments of female slavery at the same time as they give many women the illusion that their condition has changed because they can go around in the middle of a world of machines in the home. In this way the system achieves a double result: increase its dividends through industry, which defines the recent stage of capitalism, and keep women entertained in their cage. For those who possess the means of production it is more interesting to keep each woman in her cage while selling a hundred washing machines to a hundred families rather than installing a laundry for use by the neighborhood.

The machine, at the same time as it limits the workforce as a means of regulation of social production and as a means, then, of opposition to the domination of capital, takes women’s and artisans old skill and ability away. Marx was obliged to point out that “when the same ease of labor becomes a means of torture, in the sense that the machine doesn’t free the worker from the labor but rather takes the meaning out of work” or “when machinism is misused in order to transform the worker from infancy, in part of a machine,” the machine becomes an enemy.

In addition to artifacts and machinery, what really should be in play is the dignity of manual labor. And it’s not enough to have economic retribution in order to achieve it. We can see that neither simple financial compensation nor changing names and appearances manage to overcome the scorning of manual labor. Even though serving maids are now called “domestic employees,” earn more and have machines at their disposal, it is still the last work a woman is forced to do. In New York, despite their salary, the municipal cleaning employees are black or Puerto Rican.

We women are the Hands of the world. Besides the “specific” labor, the domestic type and the care of children and the sick, outside the home our work tends to be manual. Women scrub or work in agriculture, fishing (sorting, preparation and packing of fish, cleaning, selling etc.), canning , textile, and chemistry. All women carry out manual activities that are the worst paid and least respected. It seems that, thanks to Plato and his followers, doing manual labor or not is in direct relation to the quality of rights of the citizens. In Greece were the ones designated, in the industrialized Europe of our time, a quarter of the manual workers are women and a fifth are immigrants.

Both the philosophical theories as well as the machinist boasts increased the shame of working with one’s hands and the disdain for the work itself. For that reason the manual laborers have to hide their condition and even work secretly, as if it were something shameful. Domestic labor (no mater how necessary and vital it might be in society) is hidden work whose nature must remain hidden. Lotion on the hands and a smile on the lips when the man comes home are the first lesson a good housewife must learn.

As happens in every attack or human devaluation there is a compensatory counterpart. Women’s manual ability and skill is recognized. We all know well the meaning of “silver hands “ and “soft caresses of a woman’s hand “ etc. The skill of blacks is also recognized. The American psycho-technicians were able to verify that the reflexes of the blacks are more natural and better adapted than those of whites.

But the fact of recognizing female or black superiority within a certain field - manual labor - observed from the dominant mentality, serves to explain the marginalized condition of women and people of color. That is, recognition in a world where manual labor is devalued only leads to the exploitation of the fact. It’s a matter of designating manual skill as a “natural” condition, which is an imperialist tendency, as we already saw. This way they forget that those better reflexes, skills, intuitions etc. are due to the fact that they had to develop certain practical aptitudes in order to survive and that it was precisely the division of labor that was the principal cause of that development, or more accurately, of that continuation. It’s not a question of whether women or blacks have a special tendency or natural capacity for manual jobs to the detriment of intellectuals, but rather, throughout history, they were relegated to those jobs. In contrast, it was the Seated Sages who lost that human ability. The dominant value system allows them, with fascist irony, to flaunt their clumsiness. “How stupid! How clumsy that is! How little talent” say the Seated Sages like it’s praise.

The mechanical and even fluid explanation of the universe was substituted, in Greece, by a geometrical, centralist, as hierarchical explanation of heavenly bodies, seen as God, hierarchy that also has its social equivalent withe appearance of the Greek State. Thus the complete triumph of patriarchy over an egalitarian State is consolidated. Order defeats difference; Reason, spontaneity; Abstraction, the concrete; the Spirit, flesh and the body. Oddly enough, with today’s mentality there is still the underlying idea that woman is different, natural, spontaneous. In the Bible she was flesh and sinful sensuality; today, she is still the forbidden fruit, desired and feared, for some repressed persons who try to mutilate female sensuality, physically and mentally.

Plato and his followers, on affirming that “we are closer to knowledge if we avoid exchange and communication with the body, scorned the emotions and all contact with reality. The Christians share that masochistic ascetism that will be transmitted, through history, to today’s communism.

With a clever technique of sophistication, Plato proves, in a passage of The Republic, that the one who possesses true knowledge of something is not the one who makes it but the one who uses it. This doctrine, which rejects any link of thought to practice, exalts the position of the consumer in society and lowers that of the producer. The political importance of these ideas in a society that has slave owners is evident. The female slaves who make the objects cannot be allowed to possess a science superior to that of the owner who uses them.This was the criterion for taking away from women agriculture, weaving, pottery making, medicine (we’d need to talk about burning witches, even in recent times) and all the techniques that were in our hands. And already in the chapter on slavery the lack of value of work typically done by women, like that of slaves, is clear. Plato was corrupted by the acceptance of the slave holding society in which he lived. “Humanists” also currently collaborate with today’s patriarchal and machista society. Aristotle, in Politics, affirms that it is a great virtue that “the slave and the master have a common existence.” Marvelous connection, similar to marriage today. Centuries afterwards, Marx, in his writings, affirms that “the immediate, natural, necessary relationship of man with man is the relationship of man with woman… the relationship of man with nature.” Marx identifies woman with nature just as Plato did with slaves. Marx continues: “In every joined condition there are always a governing factor and a submission factor, and this characteristic of living things is present in them, like a consequence of nature itself.” Thus, the master and the slave, man and woman, form “a combined thing,” like the most natural scheme. The proletarian and the bourgeois are also a combined condition. I repeat, it’s not possible to use nature to explain submission. But in fact, even for racist minds, we can hear the argument that we women and blacks are socially inferior because we are less intelligent. Racist criteria are sill alive and in this age they are adorned with pseudoscientific reasoning. Social inequalities are justified, from a biological and natural point of view, by professor Hans J. Eysenck (of London University) in his books The Inequality of Man and Race, Intelligence, and Education. These are racist books with scientific pretensions. The professor reasons that if blacks have few academic successes than whites it’s because they are congenitally more stupid. I don’t know how he would explain the differences among the same physicalm types or the fact that the children of the lower classes in our land, Galician speakers, don’t achieve the same academic levels as the children of the bourgeoisie who are the same race.

The surveys done in different countries can show that the people of the upper classes obtain the best positions and are more intelligent than the poor. Even a committed Marxist can affirm today: “Of course not all manual laborers are mentally weak, but a large proportion of those with deficiency are manual laborers.” Pretty sophism. The champions of equality already have their arguments and are satisfied. But what type of intelligence are they talking about? What is the canon for intelligence and who decides it? Naturally it’s the men in the upper classes.

Let’s ask some questions. What would the elitist professor do if he had to earn a living with his hands, like those “deficient” persons, or if they put him in the kitchen to prepare a meal and wash dishes? What would or informed leaders, all of them very white, if we dropped them in the Kalahari desert? (Which isn’t a bad idea, by the way.) At that moment wouldn’t they long for the intelligence of a black in those regions in order to survive? The fact is, each of us could ask hundreds of questions that no racist scientist could answer.

The racist “scientist” ought to attribute the academic failures of blacks to the educational system itself, conceived by the white ruling class and which thus favors the minds formed in its image, modeled by the bourgeoisie, the children of the privileged classes.

From this we deduce that true democratization of teaching doesn’t consist simply of the lower classes having access to schools. They will always be at a disadvantage as long as the model for culture and the norm for intelligence are imposed by the elites of a class that looks down on all culture that doesn’t follow its models of social inequality and economic exploitation.

So-called coeducation falls into the same false thinking. In reality the education of girls and boys is based on different destinies and the roles society makes them play. Society, family, and school create the models they should follow. All education starts from a sexist ideology in which the slightest deviation from the norm on the part of girls or boys can be considered dangerous and they can be called marimachos (masculine women) or effeminate. A girl should be docile, submissive, discrete, have a good “feminine” appearance. Rebelliousness, independence, and excessive curiosity will be repressed by their educators because these attitudes can be real problems for the role the system assigns them. Of course boys also suffer pressure regarding their behavior until it fits the macho model, but their model is that of social privileges and the boy learns the lesson right away. To be like a girl is to belittle him, he already belongs to the superior class from the moment he’s born. Language is masculine, so are the main characters of stories, heroes, rulers, scientists, writers, etc. Boys are confident and well protected in their physical and cultural environment. The games they are given are creative, and they build things, compete, win, run, and become hardened. “Boys don’t cry, that’s what girls do,” warns the norm, and with hundreds of details they habitually internalize the disdain for the other sex.

The differences in behavior are learned through education and social conditioning. The machista society fixes the values and declares what is good for some and bad for others. It forgets to tell us where the true values are, independent of the different roles of the sexes. That is where true coeducation would begin. But what they call coeducation today is no more than mixed education, where the masculine model continues to be the universal one and superior, and the feminine world, scorned and ridiculed. In this situation, coeducation is nothing more than an assimilating lie.

The model of intelligence with the greatest force is that of the Seated Sages and the persons who weren’t trained intellectually according to the norm, who don’t fit the model of intelligence that is in power are, for them, mentally deficient. What needs to change are the criteria of evaluation. That is why I affirm that the “igualitarian” and reformist attitude that attempts to integrate women into the world of men and have asumed their order of values is erroneous. We can learn their ideas, even brilliantly, but the positions of power and responsibility belong to men. With great effort we can achieve positions of a certain level in exchange for accepting the virile-fascist model. I think this, which a certain type of feminism interprets as a conquest, but I think it’s a disaster. It’s not a matter of integrating us into that world of denigration, but of deciding, of responding to that world, and creating another.

So like Plato and all free Greeks were incapable of recognizing slavery, so natural, men are the same as far as recognizing women’s slavery. The way of living brings with it the way of thinking. Marx and Engels, in German Ideology, explained that phenomenon this way: “The dominant thinking is nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships that are taken in the form of ideas… the ideas of their dominance.”

Ultimately all the pseudoscientific theories and the elitist ideologies stem from a lack of confidence in human nature. For that reason they write Nature with a capital letter, that is, Singular Nature and not the plural nature of all people, popular nature. The study of this popular nature “doesn’t produce men who tend to brag and look down on the culture that required so much effort; on the contrary, it creates serious, independent people who base their pride on personal qualities and not on external circumstances,” said Epicurus. But his confidence in nature was considered dangerous for a society based on exploitation. To maintain injustice, science must be patrimony of a few while truth is considered unreachable and even dangerous. Plato made this fact clear in a passage of The Republic: “If some are meant to have, more than others, the privilege of telling lies, these should be the leaders of the State who, with their conduct, both with enemies and the citizens themselves, ought to have the possibility of lying for the public good.” That was how the scientific philosophy of the nature of everyone was substituted by a political philosophy in function of the Power of the State over all.

We saw previously how Plato was the efficacious ideological precedent of the consumer society. The Platonic theory of consumerism also has its patriarchal application. The scorn for the producer includes women, producers of children, new beings. A woman cannot, of course, be superior to the master who uses her body and her ability to work and who will wield power, the patria potestad, over the new being. From this point of view, exalting paternity is exalting the consumer. The beneficiary is the one who possesses science, art, and power. Procreation is established legally and socially through the man, so that it seems the man is the one who produces the children. We women are instruments of nature, like slaves.

The hand is in direct relationship to a third of the brain cells. It receives orders from the brain but also transmits information.

Under the influence of the dominant way of thinking we learn, already as children, that man began to walk upright in order to use his hands. It would be the brain, ideal intelligence, that would order the bodily change. Recently anthropologists have just discovered an ancient ancestor with the brain of an ape but walking upright. There is no need for many arguments because it’s clear that the brain, intelligence, doesn’t evolve without hands. Manual information, registered in memory, participates in the creation of what we call “ideas.”

Not everything is abstraction in the brain, nor theories, nor symbolic aptitudes. The right hemisphere controls the sense of space and forms. We see immediate knowledge, what we call intuitive, that is, what can be fit into formulas. The general opinion about the intuitive capacity of women, as well as their realistic tendency, is a product of their relationship with space through their hands. Thus we see how feminine intuition is not a “natural and innate “ capacity, but the result of practical exercise.

The Seated Sages should recognize that without this relationship with space their vision of the world is cross-eyed. The biologist Dr. Carl Sagan affirms that “every truly creative act, whether it be law, moral, artistic, musical, or technical, demands the collaboration of the two cerebral hemispheres.” Between the two hemispheres there is a corpus callosum, a bridge of nerve cells, that facilitates a perpetual exchange of information. Culture depends on that bridge. A man who does no manual work, who doesn’t use his hands, a being for whom the hands are not a way of learning, is truly a cerebral hemiplegic. We live under the dictatorship of the left hemisphere, under the control of the regime of verbocracy. To the theoretical speculation of these hemiplegics we owe a history of humanity that tends to suppress sensitivity, to the erasure of the body and the senses, to sacrifice the true pleasure of people on behalf of abstractions and postponing happiness for hypothetical futures that nobody ever sees.

We must recognize that, today, feminism is the only option that speaks in its programs and texts of more human personal relationships, of the value of difference, of the right to one’s own body, and that proposes a different concept of labor, sex, love, and happiness.

The others remain faithful to Plato and keep proclaiming that “Truth is in the Idea.” Ideas are the necessary product for those who refuse to put in the base of the concept of the world historical, real persons, not abstract ideas. Both the so-called right and the left participate in this manipulation. In this sense, the proletariat, whose defense defines the partidos of the left, is also an abstraction. What is the proletariat really? Where is it? What does it look like? What gestures does it make? How does it think?… We don’t have a clear idea. What is known is that the defense of the idea of the proletariat absolutely does not compromise the behavior in daily life of a leftist militant. In this way, ideas are a cover for the real relationships people have and politics become an activity separate from life.

In the name of Reason, Order, and the State, the various dominant orders were conceived and continue to be conceived. Thus exploitation does not cease when systems change and happiness becomes a chimera only to be reached in illusory worlds.

Taking back our hands, our bodies, and our emotions and organizing the world based on these elements would be the point of departure of any possible change. Only in this manner could the phrase of Bacon be verified: “The practical results of nature aren’t just means to improve our wellbeing; rather, they are also the best guarantee of truth.”

(1) John 1:1 (Editor’s note).

(2) Probable source: Farrington, Benjamin, Greek Science, Dufour Editions, Pennsylvania, 1953 (Editor’s note.)

(3) Monod, Jacques, Le Hasard et la Necessité. Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne, Éditions du Seuil, París, 1970 (Editor’s nate.)

(4) Glotz, Gustave (1862-1935) was a French historian, specialist in classical Greece (Editor’s note.)

(5) Probable source: Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, “The Childish Illness of the Left in Communism,” in Selected works, v. 1, Ediçōes Avante!, Lisbon, 1977 [1920] (Editor’s note).

(6) Probable source: Plato, Phaedo or On the Soul (Editor’s note.)

(7) Matthew 18:9 (Editor’s note.)

(8) Marx, Das Kapital, op.cit. (Editor’s note.)

(9) Eysenk, Hans J., The Inequality of Man, Temple Smith, Londres, 1973; Race, Intelligence, and Education, Temple Smith, Londres, 1971. Queizán notes some ideas from this second book.

(10) Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedich, Die Deutsche Ideologie, Moscow, 1932. (Editor’s note.)

(11) Astronomer and science proponent, de defended the thesis concerning the complementary nature of the two hemispheres of the brain in a book that received the Pulitzer Prize. See: Sagan, Carl, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Random House, New York, 1977 (Editor’s note.)