There is nothing worse than living in uncertainty. Human beings need a minimum of knowledge of their environment in order to be able to organize their lives day by day, not to mention that this environment should be stable so that they can grow and develop. Hence, at the end of a year, the minimum reasonable time we give ourselves to make decisions about our lives, we are asking ourselves if what is coming will be worse or better than what we have already lived, in the same period of time before, in order to make the best decisions.
This principle operates not only for individuals, but also for families, companies and governments. At the end of the year, the evaluation is made to make decisions, but the key factor that operates here is certainty. And why do I say that? Perhaps with an example you can appreciate it better.
A person who in December does not know if he will have a job in January, because at the end of the year the company told him that they did not know if they would close due to the economic crisis, will behave very differently from someone who reasonably knows, or is certain, that he will return to work the following month to be able to continue supporting his family. He who is certain of his job will organize his life based on that reality, being able to plan his life because he is certain - at least immediately - that he will have a job.
And so we can extrapolate the principle to other areas of life. A company that does not have the certainty that it will have its inputs at a certain price will make completely different decisions about the price of its products than those that know for certain that the raw materials for its products will not move. A government that allows uncertainty to dominate will never be able to provide certainty of political stability to its people.
Certainty is therefore a key and fundamental factor in the equation of a people's welfare, and it is the duty of every ruler, or of anyone who intends to become one, to try to guarantee it in as many orders as possible. And I will dare to say more: he who does not radiate certainty in his conduct will hardly generate sufficient confidence.
Why do you think companies look for "experienced" personnel? Because that way they have the certainty that this worker will do the required job and will not come to learn, generating problems and delays. That does not mean that not having experience is bad, but what those who need to employ someone are looking for is productivity and efficiency in the work for the short term, without the cost of a learning curve.
And you may ask me, what is all this talk of certainty about on this last day of the year 2023? We Venezuelans have seen the degradation in many ways of what the DRAE calls certainty, in its first meaning: "1. f. certainty. Sin.: certainty, certainty, evidence, truth, security, conviction, conviction" (see in Spanish DRAE, Certidumbre, in https://dle.rae.es/certidumbre?m=form).
That is, certainty, truth, security, conviction. In today's Venezuela there is no certainty of anything for the coming year, starting with the political arena, which defines everything else. Examples: There is no certainty that the elected opposition candidate will measure herself against the regime in free, fair and verifiable elections; there is no certainty whether or not there will be elections; there is no certainty about the actions of the new opposition in the face of a regime that every time demonstrates with facts that it is going ahead in the "negotiations" it is making with the supposed "opposition"; there is no certainty as to whether the mandate of the opposition people on October 22 will ever materialize, to displace once and for all the collaborationist opposition that lost in front of the people, responsible for a failed interim. And that is just to begin with. There is in all of us at the close of 2023 a complete uncertainty towards 2024.
Let me expand a little more on the importance of the concept of certainty as applied to organized human groups, and perhaps this last day of the year may perhaps - just perhaps - become useful to someone with the power to make decisions in the opposition.
As you move up from the level of the average person to the decision-makers in any group, we witness a continuous degradation of the certainty in which individuals operate. Ordinary people require certainty in order to be productive and accomplish things in life, as mentioned earlier.
These common people need guidelines previously established by someone who knows what they want and where they are going (usually a boss, a leader, a politician in government positions). I must make an aside here: that boss or leader HAS THE OBLIGATION to know where he or she is going. But not towards a generic objective, as in the case of the opposition, "to get out of the regime", but that objective must be stratified and quantified in order to achieve tangible results, establishing clear goals that can be followed, understood and executed by those who follow the common people.
The common people require, need, to have certainty, to know with clarity and detail what is being asked of them, not an ethereal "we are going to get out of Maduro's regime". NO. They need to know at their level what are the concrete actions to be taken, and it is the leader's responsibility to establish a follow-up and control mechanism to know if those actions were fulfilled. From the systemic point of view, the common people are closed to the environment, and it should be completely transparent to them the variations that occur in a changing political environment.
The leaders, who lead the group, the decision-making levels of political action, must, unlike the people at the bottom of the pyramid, function in accordance with the environment, and respond to its permanent changes in order to derive from it the decisions that affect the natural behavior of the people who follow them. Leaders, NOT PEOPLE, are the ones who must work and live in constant uncertainty, attentive to what may happen in order to take the corresponding actions, transforming uncertainty into certainty for their people. Is that easy? Of course not! That is why they have to earn the position of leaders.
As uncertainty changes to certainty through the actions taken by the leadership, decisions will become the closed domain of those who manage, at the base of the pyramid, certainty as the main factor. This is the continuous flow where uncertainty becomes certainty in organized human groups.
These concepts are by no means new, nor did I invent them. They were developed in the best business schools and universities of the world in the last century and successfully applied in complex organizations and situations. And even though the environments to which they are applied have changed, people still react in the same way. The difference lies in the speed of change and the mountain of information now being handled, things that can be addressed in these times with tools that did not exist before.
What should we expect in the year ahead? It would be good to begin with that the new leadership that emerged on October 22 starts by bringing down the uncertainty, assuming it and getting in front of it, protecting us from the distortions it produces, in order to lead a collective to a triumph that we desperately need.
Without knowing all the previous theory, Sir Winston Churchill lowered the uncertainty of the English, speaking clearly and truthfully to the population, obtaining the necessary collaboration and unified attitude of the people to move forward, by clearly defining what he could offer. This was a unique case of intuitive political leadership in the world. He achieved this with his famous phrase before the British Parliament, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat", making whatever that leader asked of him strengthen any action of resistance in the face of the enemy.
Another more recent example of the generation of certainty applied by a political leadership is the one demonstrated by President Javier Milei in Argentina, by clearly stating to his people the problem that the country has, those responsible for the misfortune they have been living for more than 100 years and the solutions to be applied since he practically started the presidential campaign, clearly indicating the new role he expects from his people. Milei took charge and radiated certainty to the Argentines. This generated confidence and he was elected president. Apart from all the problems that his government will surely face, the burden of uncertainty is no longer on the Argentine people but on his leadership. I hope these examples clarify the concept.
I would love that attitude from the Venezuelan political leadership, although unfortunately they are used to the kind of politics that has historically been used in Venezuela, where acting contradictorily in front of the people, believing that we are not capable of digesting the truth, what they really achieve is to create high doses of uncertainty That has to change if we want to get out of this tragedy. 2024 could be a good time to start.
On December 31, 2018, I had the audacity to give leadership advice to an incipient "new generation of political leaders" who would take over the opposition of the legitimate National Assembly as of January 2019. Young people with no work experience whatsoever were taking charge of our political destiny. We all know how that ended (see For effective leadership in 2019, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/for-effective-leadership-in-2019_31.html).
I hope I am not making the same mistake today, suggesting this new opposition for an accurate management of certainty. At that time, I was saying that the leadership that would be in charge of the opposition struggle -or resistance- in 2019 would have the very high responsibility of being effective, giving some advice for that. That years of failures could no longer be tolerated. But I was wrong. Nor were they effective and we are still tolerating the failures of those opposition sorcerer's apprentices. However, as I mentioned on December 24, we Venezuelans are still here holding our ground because we are resilient, and I believe that the end of the year advice of an old oppositionist, given with the best of good intentions and respect, does not hurt anyone.
Again, my dear friends, followers and readers of TICs & Derechos Humanos, my sincere thanks for following these notes throughout the year 2023, wishing you the best for the year 2024, and hoping -as always- that this will truly be the year of Freedom... Happy New Year 2024!
Caracas, December 31, 2023
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