A cultural and institutional reading of the statist reflex shaping Uruguay’s political evolution.
– Statism as a cultural reflex
– The constitutional expansion of state intervention
– The tension between bureaucratic tutelage and civic freedom
Statism, a National Pathology
A country with luck: its rulers do everything wrong, yet it survives
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano
In Uruguay, “statism” is not a political doctrine, but a clinical pathology.
To nationalize everything that moves and paint it with bureaucracy is an obsessive-compulsive disorder of the national spirit.
If the State is the “Great Watchman,” the citizen is the patient who repeats a ritual to avoid a catastrophe that exists only in his imagination.
Adam Smith and the “Ritual of Stamping”
For Smith, the market is a breathing organism.
Uruguayan statism would then be a voluntary apnea.
The clinical symptom of OCD is the compulsion for the form.
The patient believes that if a paper does not have three stamps and the signature of a yawning, ill-mannered official, reality will disintegrate.
Smith would note that the Uruguayan suffers from the OCD of “infinite inspection.”
He prefers an industry to die of starvation rather than allow it to be born without permission from the Ministry of Nothingness.
Natural order causes him agoraphobia.
He only feels safe within four walls surrounded by dead laws.
Tocqueville and the “Fear of Open Air”
Alexis would observe that the Uruguayan suffers from civic agoraphobia.
The State is not a tool.
It is the “transitional object,” like a child’s stuffed toy, that allows him to sleep.
The repetition of the mantra “someone should do something” reveals the obsession with tutelage.
The citizen cannot see a problem, a pothole, an overflowing dumpster, child poverty, or even a poorly measured verse, without demanding that some abstract entity, which he knows will not do it, correct it.
It is an OCD of symmetry.
If someone has one peso more than another, the patient feels a metaphysical itch that can only be soothed by a new tax.
Inequality is the stain on the wall that does not let him sleep.
Hayek and the “Labyrinth of Security”
Hayek would see statism as a neurosis of control.
The patient tries to predict the future by means of decrees, which is as useful as trying to stop the waves with a fork.
For Uruguayans, the “Road to Serfdom” is in fact a corridor in a psychiatric hospital.
The patient votes again and again for the same jailer because he fears the “disorder” of freedom.
The OCD consists in believing that chaos can be avoided through bureaucracy.
Hayek would laugh to see that in Uruguay, the Constitution of 1830 was a dream of liberty that ended up turned into the instruction manual for this rather uncomfortable cage.
The Anatomy of Eastern OCD is a pathological obsession.
It is the utter fear that the “Market,” that invisible monster in which one is oneself a main actor, will devour us if there is not a state entity mediating.
It is a vocation to create more public bodies or offices for tasks that a child could solve with a barter.
It is a compulsion to vote every five years for whoever promises “more State presence” in order to calm anxiety.
For whoever adds junk to a national budget that looks like the inventory of an antique shop, full of useless things but terribly expensive.
The patient obtains temporary relief from his neurosis with the signing of a new collective agreement or the creation of a new national directorate, regardless of the fact that this deepens his misfortune.
A five-year nap until reality knocks on the door again.
In the manner of Sisyphus’ stone, the circular repetitions of statism are a mental disorder, and a literary disorder as well.
The Uruguayan has written a country in which the State is the author and the citizen is merely a secondary character waiting for his line of dialogue.
In 1830, the text was brief and heroic.
Today, the Constitution is a medical treatise for a patient who refuses to heal because the disease is his only identity.
Poverty is not a lack of money, but a carefully cultivated abstraction.
The fear of being responsible for our own destiny.
If we dissect the successive constitutional reforms, we observe that the Magna Carta is not a social contract, but the clinical file of a nation suffering from an “archive neurosis.”
If we compare the text of 1830 with the current one, the diagnosis of this OCD becomes evident.
What began as a declaration of principles was transformed into a litany of rituals to ward off the fear of freedom.
The Constitution of 1830 was a brief and severe poem.
Its obsession was not welfare, but the purity of the electoral body.
Article 11 suspended citizenship for “wage servants,” illiterates, and “habitual drunkards.”
Smith would see here a hand too visible attempting to prune the market of votes.
The State was already showing its first symptom of OCD.
The need for the citizen to be a perfect geometric figure, or else be nothing.
Borgesian irony would suggest that it was a constitution for a country of ghosts.
It legislated for gentlemen who read the classics in a land populated by gauchos who believed only in the knife and the plain.
The Metastasis of Ritual
If the Constitution of 1830 was a sonnet, the current one is an encyclopedia of obsessions.
The State has gone from being a judge to being an omnipresent nurse.
Article 67 creates the petrified state of Social Security.
An almost catatonic rigidity elevates pension adjustments to constitutional rank.
Here is the “Fatal Conceit.”
The patient tries to stop inflation and the passage of time with ink.
It is the ritual of washing one’s hands.
They believe that by writing “adjustment” on a piece of paper, the value of money will cease to escape through the cracks of reality.
Article 47, water as a “human right,” suffers from the OCD of magical property.
Tocqueville would smile sadly.
The Uruguayan has decided that water must be public so that no one will be responsible if it is lacking.
It is equality in thirst.
The State declares itself owner of the rain and of its distribution so as not to have to admit that it does not know how to store it.
Whereas in the Constitution of 1830 the State is a bouncer guarding the club door, in the current one it is a tutor who tucks you in and tells you horror stories about liberty and the market.
In the first, property was a sacred, almost mystical right.
In the current one, it is a social function that grants the State the power to rearrange the citizen whenever it has an anxiety attack about being responsible for himself.
In the Constitution of 1830, the individual was a citizen who had to demonstrate merit, effort, and probity.
Today he is a beneficiary who needs only to demand “new rights.”
Whereas in the Constitution of 1830 the obsession of the framers was order, so that we would not kill each other, in the current one it is political-bureaucratic security, so that we do not have to compete.
The Left cultivates dissatisfied voters because the Constitution of 1967, and its reforms in 1989, 1994, 1996, and 2004, transformed it into the “manual of national dissatisfaction.”
And it also has a license to reform supposedly sovereign verdicts.
In 1830, the State was a stranger looked at with suspicion.
Today, the State is that annoying relative who lives in the back room, whom everyone hates because he spends too much, but whom nobody throws out because he is the only one who knows where he put the pantry keys.
The majority Uruguayan suffers from the OCD of permanence.
He prefers a poverty regulated by the State, with its many holidays, stamps, and “protection” laws, to producing wealth that would force him to step out into the open air of his own talent.