Every day the world becomes more of a bipolar scene, a two-colour universe. Either all red or all blue. Parties, governments, politicians, citizens, television stations, newspapers, leaders, radio stations, intellectuals, churches, spokespeople, are either red or blue. Neither more nor less. Witnesses of two opposite extremes that never manage to resolve their radically opposed differences, denying the laws of dialectics in the process, they nevertheless have a common trait. Both admit only their colour and tolerate nothing or no one that deviates from it. Today we are witnesses to many effects of chromatopolitics. A recent example: in Germany, where the government considers the defence of the Jewish State to be a “reason of state”, a Berlin court on Tuesday 6 August sentenced a demonstrator at a pro-Palestinian protest to pay a fine of 600 euros for shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
Colour is the impression produced by a tone of light in the visual organs, a perception that is generated in the brain, which in turn interprets and distinguishes the different wavelengths that it captures from the perceptible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The human eye only perceives wavelengths when there is abundant lighting. In low light, it is seen in black and white. White is the sum of all the colours of light, while black is the absence of light. White light can be broken down into all the colours of the visible spectrum and this decomposition gives rise to the rainbow. In the world of nature, colours appear linked to flowers and fruits that stand out in the immense sea of green so that the animals attracted to them can complete the actions of fertilisation and dispersion of the seeds of plant species. According to science, the possible combinations of the 12 basic colours and the 28 auxiliary colours give a total of 16.8 million colours distinguishable by the human eye. Chromatopolitics reduces them to two! Black and white or red and blue.
At both extremes, the dogma prevails that to give a little is to change color. Reds become redder and blues become bluer. And then propaganda begins to displace rational thought. And since propaganda requires an entire apparatus, the media become more partial. Television stations become the unified voice of the same sermons. Radio stations devote more and more biased programs. Newspapers begin to purge their columnists, orient their headlines and standardize their cartoonists. Chromatopolitics makes public officials in governments, young, mature and elderly, become ostentatious, arrogant and despotic, turning left and right processes alike into its extreme poles.
Many once lucid intellectuals fall into chromatopolitics and end up standardizing their thinking. In the case of progressive or emancipatory governments, these also age, deteriorate, ossify and end up collapsing. Two concrete examples are Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Chromatopolitics is characteristic of dictatorships and authoritarian governments and denies the most basic elements of electoral or representative democracy. Chromatopolitics is a direct result of ideology, and ideologies, whatever they may be, have only led to the greatest human tragedies, such as the two world wars, cultural exterminations, massacres, purges, holy inquisitions, the burning of witches, etc. Ideologies nullify critical thinking and cloud and anesthetize the minds of human beings, suppressing in the process all the potential of the brain, considered by science to be the most complex design in the universe.
Can human beings live outside of ideologies? They can. And this is what such respected and virtuous thinkers of recent decades as Erich Fromm, Arthur Koestler, Frijot Capra, Karel Kosik, Edgar Morin, Enrique Dussel and Morris Berman have bet on. We owe this last author, an American historian, an explanation on the subject. “An idea is something you possess, ideology is something that possesses you.” Human beings adopt an ideology because of their lack of “somatic anchoring”, because of their lack of roots in life itself, because of their inability to confront silence and emptiness.
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