Yearly Archives: 2012

A person’s perspective on public affairs determines the way of acting. Joseph de Maistre, a strategist and critic of the French Revolution at the end of the XVII Century, wrote: “Opinion is so powerful in war that it can alter the nature of the same event and give it two different names, for no reason […]

One would think that victims would be the first to be interested in what is referred to as “due process” of law. In essence, the concept implies that the procedures that judicial authorities follow in their inquiries and investigations must adhere strictly to legal limits, and cannot be unfair, arbitrary or unreasonable vis-a-vis the person […]

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself,” said physicist Richard Feynman, “and you are the easiest person to fool.” This is how our perception of Brazil seems to be these days: it is easier to conjure up barriers on likenesses and differences than to identify what is relevant and to adopt a […]

Would it be possible for a solution that appears to be perfect in concept to be nothing more than a false start, a chimera? Einstein affirmed that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”. It seems to me that in discussions on how to confront […]

Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French thinker and politician, coined the idea that certain countries would be exceptional, that is, qualitatively distinct from the others. Great myths have been constructed around this appreciation. What makes a society distinctive is the nature of its population, its history and culture, and its way of being. In this […]

On occasion we Mexicans don’t realize how uncommonly lucky we’ve been. Fraught with problems of our immediate milieu and thoroughgoing pessimists, we often do not recognize that the political and economic changes of the recent decades have been exceptionally seamless. When one observes and analyzes the survival logic of regimes such as those of Cuba, […]

The future is not something that comes about on its own. Rather, it is the product of decisions that are made, or not made, day to day. The entirety of the decisions made by a government, as well as the accumulation of actions and decisions undertaken by each and every member of a society, shape […]

The key to success for a political strategist is to appear innocent and to have a reputation for honesty and benevolence. He or she who attempts to appear Machiavellian simply is not. At least this is what Machiavelli said. On voting last Sunday, the PANists would not have disappointed him. The internal contest of PAN, […]

Oscar Wilde famously wrote that “to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looks like carelessness”. It would be worthwhile to ask what the famous Irish writer and poet would have said of the investment levels that characterize the Mexican economy. If there is something that unites all Mexicans […]

Inherent in human nature is the desire for and expectation of improvement in life. However, less common is the recognition of what it would be necessary to do for this to be possible. Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are nearly, orderly systems […]