Can speech change the societal world? The answer is yes, it can. Once an idea gains wide social consensus, manages to become dominant and colonises the political discourse, it can change society and its economic and institutional order.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Real Socialism, many right and left wing liberal thinkers, grew fond of the idea that the world would become eventually unified under liberal capitalism and its own version of liberal democracy – as if capitalism were a force independent from any from of human influence, necessarily progressing towards its self-fulfilment. Such idea mirrored the marxist assumption of a social, cultural and political super-structure determined by an economic structure made of social relations of power, which, in capitalist society would lead to the collapse of capital and the rise of communist society.
The first two decades of the new millennium proved all this to be wrong. The rise (once again) of national identities (and in some cases of religion-based national identities) not just questioned the unifying and homologating forces of capitalism, but also the institutional organisation of liberal democracy in its various forms. In Europe all this resulted in a widespread euroscepticism which not only caused the Brexit, but threatened the existence of the Euro and the European Union.
How did this happen? From just a statement, euroscepticism managed to gain so much social and political consent to empower nationalist, far right parties and political formations in countries such as Italy, the US, UK, Bulgaria, and even, to some extent, France, Germany, Netherlands and Austria.
I have recently finished reading “Hard Times”, a novel written by literature Nobel Prize Mario Vargas Llosa. The book tells the story of how the United Fruit Company, later known as Chiquita, managed in the early 1950s to convince the US government, public opinion and liberal press to support a coupe that would overthrow the democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.
Jacobo Árbenz was a liberal, anticommunist politician who wanted to transform Guatemala into a liberal, capitalist democracy. In order to achieve this goal, Árbenz launched a land reform aimed at liberating the land from the United Fruit Company’s latifundia, turning slaves into land-owners and forcing the United Fruit to pay taxes.
Being afraid of losing control of lands in Guatemala and fearing that Árbenz reform would trigger similar liberating processes in the whole Central America, the United Fruit Company hired Edward L. Bernays (the father of Public Relations and Sigmund Freud’s nephew). The purpose being to convince the US government, public opinion and press that Guatemala was about to become a Soviet Union’s satellite that would have brought communism in the whole Central and South America, thus threatening the existence of the US.
Bernays successfully fulfilled his mission. The CIA overthrew Árbenz’s goverment and established a repressive government in Guatemala. As it is possible the read in the book’s summary, a fake news shaped the future of Guatemala and of Central and South America.
As Carlo Levi once said, words are stones. Speech has the power to affect the relations of power between individuals and social groups, shape culture and change society.
Antonio Desiderio