By now, I think we’ve all heard of “self-fulfilling prophecies,” a concept that comes from sociology and social psychology. It describes what happens when an expectation conditions our behavior so much that it ends up becoming a reality. For example, it happens when we go to a job interview convinced that they are not going to choose us. We arrived late, unkempt and with a bad attitude. The result is predictable. They don’t hire us. Could it be that we have become so negative that it doesn’t matter who is elected president because we are convinced that everything is going to go wrong?
In fact, it is likely that more than being sick with “self-fulfilling prophecies” we are affected by something different, but similar, which is the “blocked future syndrome.” It is a phenomenon in which people lose the ability to imagine a possible tomorrow and, therefore, become paralyzed and stop acting.
Saving the distance, that description reminds me of the movie Rodrigo D. No future. Many of its characters are so trapped in a dark present that it is impossible for them to imagine building a life project.
After so many years of hearing that this country is beyond repair, we may have come to believe it.
Although the concept of “blocked future syndrome” was born to explain individual experiences, I believe it can also help understand certain states of mind of Colombians. Decades of violence, displacement, drug trafficking, corruption and crisis have left a deep mark on our collective memory. After so many years of hearing that this country is beyond repair, we may have come to believe it.
The problem is that when an entire society becomes convinced that everything is going to go wrong, the same thing can happen to it as it does to individuals. Block your future. Your ability to undertake projects, build agreements or take risks is weakened. In other words, the negative expectation begins to shape collective behavior and the negative result that is feared ends up occurring.
Having hope is difficult because it not only means retaining the ability to imagine a different tomorrow, but acting accordingly. So cheer up. As someone once said, the only solution is change. The worst thing we could do to build a better future is to give up on it.
