Photo: Presidency of Mexico / EFE
Social networks have been filled with conspiracy theories, which should not worry us too much. Ultimately these have always existed. People have to entertain themselves with something, even if it is nonsense. If you want to play with the notion that a Jewish laser beam caused the fires in California as argued by a far-right US congresswoman, we must thank you for giving us something to laugh at.
If the nonsense were left there, things would be simple, but the problem is that they have dragged some “social scientists”, deliberate quotation marks, because as scientists they only have that of which they are dedicated to social “sciences”, that with them they have lost the scientific.
Some components of this discourse are: relying on false information, crude and crude reinterpretations of history and reality, and of course speculation , which according to the dictionary is “Idea or thought not grounded and formed without attending to a real base.”
Among the speculations that have arisen around the government of the President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador is that he will seek re-election.
Since what and the president began his government has consistently denied that he wants to be reelected. Even more, he has reaffirmed that at the end of his six-year term he is going to his ranch, which throws the version that he wants to become the moral leader of his party. So far he has shown no sign of lying. Then then speculation breaks out as part of the dirty war that has haunted him since 2006.
The re-election version has now been modified with which he will seek to extend his term. A subject in which the government has not given indications of being interested either, so we must assume what we think the government thinks, and hence feed the speculation that tries to disguise itself as analysis.
And then we come to spurious correlations. According to the spurious dictionary it is “that it is false, illegitimate or not authentic”. The Mexican Congress approved a judicial reform developed mainly by the judiciary and at the last minute a transitory article was added to the law to extend the presidency of the Supreme Court of Justice.
From there they started to say that the president violated the Constitution and that legislators should respect the Constitution as if it were written in stone and the 720 changes that it has undergone, among which the articles (job), 27 (property regime) and 89 (Executive powers), which have been modified 144 times.
But spurious speculation advances, suggesting that the extension be passed, because the Supreme Court is still must determine its constitutionality, it would be the signal that AMLO will seek to extend his mandate. As if both positions were the same, as if politics were a simple linear projection from one event to another, and as if political conditions did not change. A necessarily leads to B, or what is the same as confusing gymnastics with magnesia.
But there are several events that cross between the absurdities of an opposition that does not finds ways to hit the president.
The first event is the June midterm election, which for some will be a kind of referendum, not only if MORENA maintains the majority, but if the opposition will succeed in imposing itself to generate a three-year paralysis.
The second event is the popular consultation through which the president seeks broad social validation on his management, having offered that if he did not pass the test he would withdraw, an unprecedented political situation in the country.
Spurious speculation seeks to undermine the cohesive elements of the system and with this, it threatens democracy. Science can and should help to level the ground, but it faces irrational positions, and a pseudo-debate that seeks to move away from reality to modify it with a factious intentionality, and therefore, seeks to destroy; while science seeks the exact opposite, the construction from objective analysis.
Meanwhile, the gains and losses in the system are distributed asymmetrically, and with This is the satisfactions and sufferings, all bad signs for democracy.