The Republic of Lost Illusions: The Cost of Governing in Denial of Reality

A reflection on fiduciary responsibility, institutional checks and balances, and the political consequences of replacing evidence with political narratives.

The Republic of Lost Illusions
On the Cost of Ignoring Reality and Governing Without Checks and Balances
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

Contemporary politics suffers from an incurable pathology: a congenital inability to accept facts as they truly are, instead perceiving them through the distortion of political interest. This has resulted in public disbelief, electoral punishment and declining polling numbers, leaving both government and opposition disoriented.
When the exercise of political power is examined with intellectual rigor—far removed from ideological trenches and partisan pamphleteering—patterns of behavior emerge that are not the product of chance, but rather of a profound misconception about how society functions, how public resources should be administered, and why institutions deserve respect.
Today, this version of the political left has, through cowardice, infected the entire political establishment, whose members lose their resolve whenever it comes to speaking plainly and accepting responsibility without equivocation.
The Myth of Infinite Resources and Fiduciary Irresponsibility
Governing is, above all, the responsible management of scarcity under a fiduciary obligation. Yet there is a systematic tendency to treat public funds as either an inexhaustible spoils system or a vehicle for clientelism. Once the state apparatus becomes hypertrophied and institutional checks are weakened, waste ceases to be an accident and becomes a governing method.
Ethical deviations and abuses in public office are not merely moral anecdotes attributable to one politician or another; they are the predictable consequence of concentrating economic discretion in institutions operating beyond even the most basic standards of accountability.
Those who fail to understand that state resources are, in reality, the hard-earned sacrifice of taxpayers ultimately transform public administration into a corporatist privilege that steadily erodes public trust.
Escaping Forward: Political Narratives and Convenient Enemies
When confronted with the stubborn evidence of economic failure or obvious administrative inefficiency, the instinctive response is rarely self-criticism but rather the construction of a convenient political narrative.
Global conspiracies are invented. Markets, international actors or inherited problems from previous administrations are blamed, all to avoid acknowledging that the laws of economics and human incentives cannot be suspended by decree.
A statesman with a genuine republican vocation accepts real constraints and assumes political responsibility. The demagogue, by contrast, prefers to sacrifice the well-being of his own people rather than admit that his theoretical dogma was simply unworkable.
Merit Displaced and Pragmatism Without Scruples: Arbitrariness and Opacity
Managing a modern nation requires lucid minds, technically competent teams and effective execution. Yet whenever political loyalty or ideological militancy takes precedence over professional merit, the state fills with political operatives while emptying itself of talent.
This loss of technical capacity inevitably leads to contempt for formal procedures as well as environmental and legal safeguards. We have seen this reflected in highly discretionary decisions: from attempts to push forward projects such as the Casupá reservoir solely through political and ideological imposition—expropriating land and committing international loans without even obtaining the prior environmental authorization required to verify technical feasibility—to tailor-made changes in environmental protection rules, as occurred when the Carrasco Wetlands were removed from the protected areas list only days before a major foreign real estate investment was finalized there.
Whenever political narratives or corporate interests prevail over the public interest, transparency becomes an inconvenience. This is equally evident in the systematic use of secrecy—such as the decision to keep the Cardama litigation confidential—and in the direct hiring of costly international legal advisory services solely by executive decision, bypassing ordinary oversight mechanisms while providing citizens with minimal explanation.
Politics as Survival: Fear of Losing Office and the Temptation of Corruption
There is one dimension of political power that is rarely discussed when analyzing this dynamic: the psychology of leaders who know, deep down, that their governing model is unsustainable over the long term.
When a political movement reaches office promising miraculous solutions while creating expectations that can never realistically be fulfilled, it incurs an unpayable debt to its own supporters. What happens once political cycles come to an end, public finances deteriorate and popular frustration becomes undeniable?
For leaders whose only livelihood and life project depend upon remaining within the state apparatus, losing office amounts to a form of civic death.
At that crossroads, institutional scruples evaporate. The calculation is no longer how to secure the nation’s long-term sustainability, but how to survive the next electoral cycle.
To satisfy pressure groups and finance political structures, corruption ceases to be an individual vice and instead becomes the lubricant required to keep a failing system operating. The state is colonized to build networks of mutual protection and preserve accumulated privileges; if the party loses power, it also loses influence and impunity.
It is the cycle of the desperate gambler who doubles down through ever more dogma and discretion in an attempt to conceal mounting failures.
The Permanent Divorce from Empirical Evidence
Persistently insisting on statist formulas, suffocating regulations and arbitrary legal interventions under the promise that “this time it will work” is neither courage nor conviction—it is ideological blindness. History has demonstrated repeatedly that reality is stubborn and does not negotiate with dogma.
Societies advance only when they abandon collectivist illusions, respect individual liberty, reward effort and recognize that the state’s role is to guarantee clear rules, fairness and institutional transparency—not to replace the creative initiative of citizens nor to operate in the shadows. Everything else is ideological storytelling, paid for at enormous cost through national decline and the erosion of the Republic.

Fiduciary responsibility
Institutional checks and balances
Empirical reality

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