Colombia is Passion?

Revised: April 23rd (last few parragraphs are new)

Ok, I think it's time.

I've been avoiding this post for a long time, but I have to face this, and I know a lot of people will not like what I'm about to write. Especially my fellow colombians, and even less my friends working in the "Colombia is Passion" campaign.

I don't like the society we call Colombia.

Yes, like in every other place on earth there are great people there, but what I am referring to is the superior entity that comprises Colombia, the sum of all these interactions between human beings, their behaviour and the repercussions of it, leading all the way up to how government institutions and private companies were created and operate.

Colombians only look out for themselves, in a very Hobbesian self-interested cooperation kind of way. I'll give you a beautiful example, which shows multiple facets of this phenomenon in one neat package. It happened to me some years ago.

I was taking a cab back home from my Uni with a friend of mine, and at this time of the day it's very common for most streets to be clogged and just brimming with cars. We'd been on the cab for almost 40 mins and I was starting to get annoyed at the cabdriver... you know when the light is green but across the street it's full of cars, and you know that if you go you'll just end up being stuck in the middle of the crossing, and then when the others get a green light they wont be able to keep going cos you just blocked the whole intersection? Well my cabdriver did that about 8 times during the whole trip.

the yellow car is our cab, and the red car won't be able to cross now, and neither will any cars behind the red one

I hate it. This is what we call "hacerse el vivo" or to be the live one. It's supposed to be sarcastic, someone that is "live" is on his toes, it's supposed to be good, and that's why we use it sarcastically. So is he making the most out of life? Of course he isn't. He's just looking out for his nearsighted self interest. He fails to see that in this situation, there is no benefit for him, cos if he just waits for the next green light he'll most likely still end up behind the blue car. At that moment this is what was going through my head: (please skip if this stuff bores you to death)

These are cars A and B. Each one has to decide whether they will do this "epic maneuver" or not. Whoever does it will screw the other one over. If they both do it they will each screw eachother over or the next one in line. -2 would be the two minutes it would take for the light to go green again (just a random number), and would therefore be the time lost if the other guy does cheat. The 1 comes from the fact that sometimes you don't end up "behind the blue car anyways" if you stay put and don't cross, since some cars from the other direction might turn and end up behind that car. Lets say half the cars do that (I'm being generous) Therefore I guess one would maybe "win" half a block (1 minute, cos 2 minutes would be a block) if I do the maneuver and the other doesn't.

Nonetheless as you can see, the sum of each permutation would be -4, -1, -1 and 0. So in general, it just sucks to cheat for the common good. Furthermore, I'm being very generous here, cos most of the times when you block the other car you're also blocking all the cars behind that one, so in fact it would be more like -2x, x being the cars able to cross in the 2 minute interval in which the light is green. With x being anything greater than 1 Nash's equilibrium would be in neither doing the epic manuever. (this last part where I'm referring to the -2x, is a big modeling faux pas, I'm aware of that, but it does give an approximation of the impact, albeit crudely).

So what did I say to the cabdriver? I just said,"hey, you know, if we all stopped doing this, everyone would get to their homes faster". I tried to reason with him, since I saw him as an equal counterpart capable of rational thinking, and explained to him that he was affecting many more people by doing it, and that it was only benefiting one person, him. I didn't even talk about the game theory table I had in my head, I was trying to keep it simple for now.

He wouldn't listen. He thought he was still making progress by doing it. So this was the first facet. Blind selfishness. But then something very surprising happened. My friend says to me, "quit trying to reason with him, he wont understand".

I've heard that line many times, "he's just a ____, he won't understand what you're saying". What? He's retarded? My genetic code is more perfect than his? Yeah right, I have pectus excavatum for gods sake, talk about faulty genetic code. Every human being has the potential to do most in life, you just have to give them credit, and not treat them as inferior because the randomness of life played them a shitty hand. But alas, in Colombia most privileged people (of which I'm thankful to be part of, otherwise I'd be selling candy on the street) equate education with intelligence, and that's wrong. You don't become smarter when you go to college, you just get the tools to express yourself better, but the innate capacity to learn is exactly that, INNATE.

I should be able to talk to this cab driver as my equal in the sense that he is rational, and is able to learn and understand simple concepts that I lay down. The same way he might explain something that is foreign to me. We are humans, and we are equal. In this case he didn't agree, but it was because of the Hobbessian selfishness that drives most of us, but I refuse to see him as lower than me.

Most people by now are scratching their head wondering where the "Colombia is Passion" comes from and what it has to do with Colombia. The "Colombia is Passion" campaign, is done by Proexport, a trade entity given authority by the governement to handle turism matters, amongst other things. The problem that I have with this campaign is that is shows only the good side of Colombia, and even though a lot of it is true, it ignores the troubles that our nation faces. Trying to send a message abroad has to come with a high degree of sincerity, and the best way to do this is to accept that not everything is roses and rainbows, there are serious problems in Colombia, things are getting better, but there's a long way to go. Even so, being one sided makes this a very hard pill for foreigners to swallow, it'll make even the largest of optimists a bit cynical.

Colombians have as much passion as the next latin nation, maybe even less, ask anyone that's tried to walk up and talk to a stranger and see what happens. Most colombians remain in their close knit cliques, and rarely stray far from them. That is the reason why I truly believe that Colombian society's main attribute is hardly passion, but rather that self-interested drive.

So, that is what is intrinsecally wrong with Colombia. We perpetuate the system by fending for ourselves, ignoring the fact that it puts unnecessary friction on the cogs of this machine we call society. Unfortunately, we also maintain the status quo by perceiving some people as inferior, therefore increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, creating self entitlement and resentment respectively.

Colombia isn't passion, Colombia is unwavering Darwinism.