Ethics is the study of human behavior, while aesthetics is the study of sensible knowledge. Values converge between them that give continuity and represent the modus operandi of a society, by its model and by its way of assuming different expressions in a certain cultural era.
History has been built and moves from the different human inclinations that come together in the midst of divinity and darkness, dignity and meanness, devotion and hostility, glory and misery, courage and cowardice, virtue and dishonor, wisdom and imprudence, coherence and excessiveness, sanity and barbarity, identity and oblivion, freedom and slavery, order and confusion, passion and contempt, love and betrayal, beauty and horror, among many others. With the purpose of consolidating the idea of “should be” as a form of good living, it is a moral paradigm that manages to establish a social structure in the midst of alteration. As Gustav Jung said: “You are what you do, not what you say you are going to do.” A peremptory mandate for leaders who exercise or aspire to exercise authority without turning ethics into a despicable object.
In the aesthetic world, ethical problems are phenomenological interests, because it is through there that the twists and ruptures that converge in a continuous dialogue are evident, through the different schemes and models that are enriched and complemented by evidencing the social lights and shadows that are projected in the context of a certain reality.
Fernando Carillo says in his book Fearless. Defend democracy from democracy (Debate, 2024): “ethics is the basis of everything and ethical collapse is the worst omen for a society.” Ethics, therefore, determines politics, law and social relations. Because with the word it is not only about what is said, but also about what makes us sensitive and the way in which that sensitivity is used as a simulation.
The cracks caused by declines, conveniences, excesses, excesses and ethical benefits and abuses are precisely what drive social changes. They highlight the existential gaps, and in this way they manage to offer the space for the people to recognize the reasons why the government does not support expectations or offer a solid basis to achieve the common good, justice and equity.
As Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom wrote at the time, in the Christmas greeting of December 25, 2008: “when life seems hard, the brave do not lower their heads and accept defeat, but are even more determined to fight for a better future.” He also had to remind him the English king himself to Donald Trumpin his recent visit to Washington, when referring to the ethical basis of Bill of Rights and the United States Declaration of Independence, which will soon be 250 years old. Necessarily, to advance towards where it is considered that the exercise of governing should lean, a line of assimilation emerges in the face of a new face and position of power. However, change by itself is not always more convenient, hence the importance of the ethical dimension of democracy, which today tends to deviate, appearing in the form of different regimes and subtle models of anarchy and authoritarianism, configuring a complete nonsense.
Turning points, from a global perspective, generate and define current events. But it is necessary for people not only to interact, but also to get involved with the reality of which they are a part. This is how the world becomes a fabric where meanings that allude to the signs of each time are always being composed and articulated. The other is to be vassals of models today predetermined by a questionable ethical neutrality of the technology that dominates us.
We think, feel and choose, but we must also influence political reality to create new expressions and a different language. But first we should ask ourselves the following questions: what is proposed today as an ethical model of society? Where does this model take us? Why are we going to fight? What and who represents us? What authority figures do I identify with? Where do I think current society should go? And also: where is or where is the human? Because humanism today clumsily identifies with a past that the new authoritarian despots want to take away from us.
