POWER to the people

The Irish satirist Jonathan Swift penned Gul­liver’s Trav­els in 1726, that is, al­most 300 years ago. Many peo­ple know only the first two parts – Gul­liver’s voy­ages to Lil­liput, where he is a giant among tiny peo­ple, and to Brob­d­ing­nag, where he ap­pears the size of a thim­ble to lo­cals – and there­fore be­lieve it to be a chil­dren’s story, es­pe­cially given that the first movie ver­sion was made as a car­toon and only in­cluded these first two parts.

But there were in fact four parts to this mas­ter­piece. In part three, A Voy­age to La­puta, Bal­ni­barbi, Lug­gnagg, Glubb­dub­drib and Japan, La­puta is an is­land city that floats in the sky. This was pri­mar­ily a fic­tional de­vice in­tended to satirise far-fetched pseudo-sci­en­tific pro­pos­als, while his vis­its to the other places in the title poke fun at hu­mans’ blind pur­suit of sci­ence with­out prac­ti­cal re­sults, com­pris­ing a satire on bu­reau­cracy.

The fourth and final part – a voy­age to the land of the Houy­hnhnms – may be seen as a pre­cur­sor to the much-loved Planet of the Apes, where apes be­come the mas­ters of hu­mans in a dystopian fu­ture, as Gul­liver ends up in a land gov­erned by a race of talk­ing horses, the Houy­hnhnms, while the de­formed sav­age crea­tures that most re­sem­ble hu­mans like him­self are called Ya­hoos. I won’t go into this any fur­ther here, suf­fice to say that it con­sti­tutes Swift’s ge­nius de­vice for crit­i­cis­ing the human con­di­tion, as Gul­liver iden­ti­fies more with the Houy­hnhnms and joins with them in high­light­ing human weak­nesses.

So why do I men­tion this book now? Be­cause it was upon read­ing it as a teenager that I was first in­tro­duced to cor­rup­tion in pol­i­tics, as Swift posed the ques­tion of whether hu­mans are in­her­ently cor­rupt or be­come cor­rupted by power. Given all that we now know about mod­ern-day politi­cians, from the PP in Spain (see Matthew’s col­umn in this edi­tion), to the Con­ser­v­a­tive party in my na­tive coun­try, to so many known cases of cor­rup­tion in so many dif­fer­ent coun­tries around the globe, to, fi­nally, the as­tound­ing ac­cu­sa­tions lev­elled at the (hope­fully out­go­ing) US pres­i­dent, Don­ald Trump, which in­clude no fewer than 26 ac­cu­sa­tions of sex­ual mis­con­duct and an es­ti­mated four thou­sand law­suits (yes 4,000, and yes, the pres­i­dent of the United States), I can only de­spair that we have not found a way to elim­i­nate the im­punity en­joyed by the rich and pow­er­ful in our so­ci­eties.

But wait a minute, it was not long ago that I re­solved to en­sure my com­ments in this col­umn were pos­i­tive ones of hope, given the suf­fo­cat­ing re­al­ity that now sur­rounds us... so where does hope lie? Clearly, if Swift’s words have changed noth­ing in 300 years of human progress, then there has to be an­other way than writ­ten con­dem­na­tion. And that way can be found both in Mar­tin’s col­umn on page 7 of this edi­tion and the in­ter­view with Fri­days For Fu­ture spok­ersper­son Martí Pardo on page 16 – the an­swer is to take ac­tion.

In other words, if you are a par­ent, show your chil­dren that they can make a dif­fer­ence by tak­ing small ac­tions on a daily basis, and if you are a young per­son who doesn’t vote (tra­di­tion­ally there are many), then ei­ther get into pol­i­tics your­self or make the dif­fer­ence by cam­paign­ing to oust cor­rupt politi­cians from of­fice. As Mar­tin says, we are not pow­er­less.