Venezuela and the Current Crisis of Western Civilization: A Civics Lesson on Our Right to Negative Logic

The West is in the midst of a crisis, not just a cultural one but a political one as well, and it is happening right now. Every patriot must ask himself a series of serious questions. Where are we headed? Where is the limit? When are we going to wake up? Are we willing to sacrifice something for our freedom?

What has just happened in Venezuela is perhaps the most unusual thing. The Chavista regime is once again mocking the whole world. The Venezuelan people, brutally oppressed, have shown us their courage, and it seems that no one is lifting a finger to help them—no one in Latin America, no one in Europe, no one in the United States.

There are Venezuelan patriots, especially the courageous María Corina Machado, who say that this is not over yet and that they will resist until the end. But that is inside Venezuela. Outside Venezuela, too, in the rest of the world, something serious is approaching. The electoral fraud in Venezuela echoes the absolute cultural and political decline of France, the ongoing unconstitutional maneuvers in Spain, and the growing tyranny of the intelligence services in the U.S.

What is happening in the U.S. may be more subtle than the Venezuelan case, but it’s just as unusual because it reflects the fact that more than half of its own citizens, along with the vast majority of the rest of the world, won’t allow themselves to recognize the risk at hand.

Everyone idealizes the U.S. Whatever we might say about Trump, the campaign to portray him as a risk to democracy, the efforts by federal and state prosecutors to accuse him of crimes invented out of thin air, and finally, the attempt to assassinate him, are aspects of the same phenomenon. Just today, I tried to search on Google for “Trump assassination,” and the autofill function remained blank. In other words, if not for Elon Musk’s X platform, Americans would be in the same situation as they were before the 2020 elections—that is, without access to the truth and swamped by hoaxes.

I reiterate that in Venezuela and the U.S., we are witnessing two extremes of the same phenomenon. Ergo, these two nations should support each other in every possible way. A democratic dictatorship, one installed under the guise of democratic values, is often the most recalcitrant and the most difficult to unravel, precisely because it imparts fanatical convictions to its followers. The climactic effect is a loss of the concept of the individual as the true basis of a free society.

Protagoras, Saint John of the Cross, Juan de Mariana, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de Palafox, René Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Jorge Luis Borges. All these thinkers have pointed to the sacred individual as the last refuge against the tyranny of the monstrous mob whose modern form is the dictatorship of the collectivist masses.

In these difficult times, it’s important, I believe, to contemplate again the principles necessary to sustain freedom. One of these is “negative logic” (see Jefferson’s Query VI and my essay). We are all fallible. We are human beings, after all. But with every political crisis, we must ask ourselves, from where does our fallibility emanate? And between any two given fallibilities, how can we locate the preferable one?

This is why I say that the democratic logic that is based on truth, and from there freedom, is the “negative way.” And the way is negative in both senses:

(1) The real world is not a utopia and never will be. We live here below. Life is what it is. We are fallen creatures; our perfection is not, and cannot be, attainable. It must remain in an eternal process. In other words, the dreams of utopians should always worry us.

(2) Those of us who believe in the possibility of truth and freedom, however imperfect, are always obligated to discern the approach to these ideals in a negative way, not a positive one. We orient ourselves towards perfection, yes, but we must always seek it by denying its ultimate attainment, at least in this life. This last idea requires clarification.

Without negative logic—i.e., without that hyper-skeptical logic that emanates from the individual and rails against both the mob and the tyrant, freedom is simply not feasible. I do not deny religious faith, which is another matter; I deny faith in our own ideologies, faith in our collectivist goals, and, in the end, faith in our rulers—even the ones we elect.

This negative logic is a way of affirming something very specific: the citizen has an obligation always to doubt the government and its representatives, thus preserving the sanctity of the individual and preserving the idea that the individual who lashes out against the mob may be from time to time completely right even in absolute isolation.

[By the way, this same negative logic sustains the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. We must always retain the means to resist our government. Tragically, the heroic leader of the opposition in Venezuela voted to take guns away from the citizens of the same country that she now claims to defend against tyrants. In this sense, she made her own bed. Let’s hope that if she wins in the end, she will reconsider her decision to disarm the populace.]

Let’s think this through. In any minimally honest legal system, the individual retains the right to speak in his defense. And in any minimally anti-tyrannical legal system, the legal principle that must be applied in the event that an individual is accused of a crime is IN DUBIO PRO REO, that is, “when there is any doubt, one must rule in favor of the accused.”

This is not as simple as saying that we prefer that a criminal be set free rather than that an innocent person go to jail. It is a principle designed to shield us all against tyrants, who will always try to seize justice as the means of oppressing the rebellious citizen. We must be vigilant about justice above all else. Thus, we must insist that there be definitive evidence against any individual accused of a crime.

Now, in a minimally honest and anti-tyrannical democracy, when we consider any action, report, or decree emanating from the government, we must reverse the principle of IN DUBIO PRO REO. If and when we judge the government, we must use the principle of IN DUBIO CONTRA AUCTORITATEM, that is, “when there is any doubt, one must rule against the government.”

Experience shows that this is the only way to avoid tyranny. The moment we find ourselves willing to give up our right, nay, our sacred obligation, to doubt the very government that wants to rule us, we will lose our freedom and it will be practically impossible to recover it.

Another way of imagining the same idea is that the government is always obliged to convince us of its innocence, and always to a radical degree. Thus, if you’re accused of being a denialist, so be it, consider it a badge of honor. When I’m accused of denying the 2020 elections since no judge has said there was fraud; when I’m accused of denying that biologists hired by the U.S. government played no part in the COVID-19 plague since there’s no definitive proof of an artificial origin to the virus; or when I’m accused of denying that the government didn’t try to kill Trump since we know so little about what actually happened; my accusers are in the wrong. This is because I do not have the slightest obligation to prove anything. It is, rather, the authorities who have to prove their innocence in each case.

More generally, only an authority that continually proves its lack of tyranny has any right to demand our obedience. To quote the ancient negative oath of the citizens of the medieval kingdom of Aragón when confronting their new king: “We, who are your equals and are as valuable as you are, but who together are more than you, make you our leader, our King and Lord among equals, provided that you safeguard our privileges and liberties; and if not, then we do not.”

The citizens of Venezuela may be less sophisticated than those of other Western countries. Still, even though they’re less capable of resisting the tyranny that’s been foisted upon them, they’re much braver than the rest of us. As a Texan, the suffering and valiant resistance of the Venezuelan people fills me with shame at the sheer gullibility of so many American citizens, as if we’re supposed to be a flock of docile and defenseless sheep prostrate before our masters—and what is worse, we accept this of our own free will.

But none of us can escape a reckoning with tyranny now. Both the U.S. and Venezuela are in crisis. It’s time to choose. Are we really going to allow our rulers to control us simply because they say they have a right and reasons to do so? Let us say no; let us negate that. We owe this to ourselves and future generations.

Image designed by Jared Gould — Joe Biden on Picryl; Nicolás Maduro on Wikimedia Commons; Flag of Venezuela on Wikimedia Commons; U.S. flag on Wikimedia Commons