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Social Security Fund reforms

About methods and contents

by Raul Leis R. --- raulleisr@hotmail.com

The president, in his recent press conference, publicly acknowledged an error and I congratulate him for it. He specified the mistake in the method used to approve Law 17, which as we know has met with public rejection --- according to public opinion polls --- both for its content as well as for the method used to pass it.

The truth is the unbecoming pseudo-conservative and hurried method has been applied since the constitutional reforms, through the tax reforms and into the reforms to the Social Security Fund (CSS).

The question is: Is method a secondary element? I think not, because there must be COHERENCE between methods and contents, the ends and the means, discourse and practice. How can the CSS reforms be upheld as valid when their principal proponent has bas admitted that the methods used to compose and approve them were invalid? Is he saying that had the correct --- democratic and participatory --- method been used there wouldn’t have been changes to the content of the reforms? I think that the content would have been different, and perhaps the country wouldn’t be in crisis today.

In other words, the reforms are legal, but not legitimate. Remember the difference. Legality is a formal criterion. Something is “legal” when it corresponds to what the signed law says; it’s the normative consecration of determined social phenomena. On the other hand, legitimacy answers “to a different criterion. It means acceptance, consensus or political consent on the part of the population with respect to a certain social phenomenon. Something is legitimate when it enjoys general approval and represents the majority. Approval can exist in different grades, and it can be achieved by different means. A normative system is seen as legitimate insofar as it responds to social needs and interests, channeled through a model of public participation in the decision making process,” according to Fridolin Birk.

Ethics is not only a manner of comportment, but also a way of building power. Power can be authoritarian --- whatever the ideological stripe --- or democratic. Coherence between the ends and the means, between what one says and does, between theory and practice, forms the capacity to build a power that doesn’t become absolute, that doesn’t alienate, that doesn’t corrupt. General goals and higher values take priority over private goals and lower values. The means, therefore, must be proportional to the ends.

There are three attitudes about ethics: acceptance, non-acceptance and mimetism. The first can be taken for conviction produced by reflection or life experiences, or by convenience of what Bergson calls a closed mind that accepts without reflection. Non-acceptance can be taken for dissidence, and mimetism is nothing more than putting on a moral façade while acting to the contrary. Eric Fromm says that “man’s spiritual goals are inseparably related to the transformation of society, politics is basically not a field that can divorce itself from moral values or from the self-realization of man.”

The Panamanian people are more sensitive to the methods of doing things these days. Many people feel offended by maneuvers in the middle of the night and by impositions. The politicians must understand that they can no longer go on playing with the people like this. Democracy is a basic necessity, but without civic participation at all social levels you can neither generate changes nor put transformations in their right perspectives.

We have permitted a few to manage democracy as something formal and restricted to minoritarian interests, divorcing it from economic and social democracy, separating electoral democracy from the democracy of citizenship.

The struggle for socio-economic democracy also shoves aside the need for real political democracy. It’s necessary to weave a total democracy in the process of building alternatives.

Participation is the antithesis of authoritarianism, which is predicated upon pre-established direction, or upon a populism that posits popular consent upon the basis of paternalism, or neo-liberalism predicated upon individual participation in the market that concentrates income and excludes groups of subordinate human beings. Participation is the pivot of wholesome life. Participation is, moreover, critical, cumulative and germinal. It’s time to develop another way of doing politics. Law 17 must be reviewed, reformed or repealed not only because of its contents but because of the way it was imposed. This will definitely mark the roads that we must take in the future, and demonstrate to us the capacity of a president not only to admit errors, but to mend them.