The Argentine ethnopsychology
(character), and recent major difficulties are discussed
in
Therivel's GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity.
Argentine Ethnopsychology
An Ethnopsychological Explanation
of Argentina's Difficulties
The above is the title of chapter 16 of volume 4 of
William A. Therivel's The GAM/DP Theory of Personality
and Creativity (G stands for genetic
endowment, A for assistances of youth, M
for misfortunes of youth, DP for division of
power, UP for unity of power). For an introduction
to the GAM part of the theory click "Introduction
to GAM"; for an introduction to the DP
part click on "Introduction
to DP".
In this website, the reader is also offered a shortcut:
The GAM/DP Synopsis
and an expanded version, The
GAM/DP Summary of volumes 1 through 4.
Hereafter I report the table of contents and a few
pages of the introduction of this chapter:
This chapter is divided into the following sections:
I. Introduction
II. Mindbinding by the Inquisition
1. A first set of key
judgments
2. Sarmiento's judgment
3. Montesquieu's and Voltaire's
judgments
4. In Sicily under the
Spaniards
5. The Anaconda effect
6. Véliz's and
Salvador de Madariaga's whitewashing
III. The vertical component of the Hispanic character
1. As seen by Madariaga
2. As seen by José
Antonio Primo de Rivera
3. As seen by López
Ibor
4. As seen by Bunkley
5. Vertical/essential
people are intransigent
6. The Inquisition, and
the emphasis on dying well
7. In answer to Sarmiento:
The great vertical men of Unamuno and Salvador
de Madariaga
8. The vertical component
as medieval thinking
9. Is this uniquely Spanish?
IV. Key terms: Ser entero, hombre total, hombre integral,
método de la pasión,
arbitrariedad, complejo de inferioridad ante la ciencia
y la técnica pero de
superioridad como estilo de vida
V. The Spaniards as the last of the pre-DP Medievals
1. The many kinds of individualism
2. Not inclined to solidarity
with the community
3. A violent passion for
honor
4. Is the hombre integro
y total more prone to being envious?
5. The aristocratic soy
quien soy's contribution to intransigence
VI. No Gálvez
1. On the arts
2. On social sense and
religion
3. On Switzerland
VII. No Sánchez-Albornoz
1. On the arts
2. On mysticism
VIII. So much violence and torture, and so few great
thinkers?
1. Violence and torture
2. So few great thinkers
IX. No, Shumway
1. Wrongly faulting the
founding fathers of Argentina
2. But the Inquisition
of Rosas (1829-1852) took place
3. But there were farmers
instead of gauchos
4. But Spain was disliked
X. A divided nation
XI. The natural but incomplete solution: Learn from
Europe
1. European books
2. The initial Euro-Argentine
political solution
3. Travel to Europe
4. Claraval's mal de Europa
5. As seen by Véliz
XII. Was Hispanidad the answer?
XIII. Conclusion
XIV. Recommendations
Recommendation N. 1
Recommendation N. 2
Recommendation N. 3
I. Introduction
Few countries seemed
to have a more assured future than Argentina. Yet things
went so wrong so quickly:
For
many decades many Europeans believed that Argentina
offered an opportunity equal to, if not greater
than, North America. The pampas estancieros enjoyed
the reputation that Texas or Arab oil magnates have
today, and the expression riche comme un Argentin
remained a commonplace among the French until the
1930s….[However,] for at least the past two
decades economists have classified Argentina in
the under-developed or "third" world,
and by the 1960s Argentina was becoming a byword
for political instability, inflation, and labor
unrest. During the 1970s a sudden procession of
horror stories emanated from Argentina-unbridled
popular riots, guerilla warfare, assassinations,
abductions, imprisonment of dissidents, institutionalized
torture, and eventually mass murder. For a time
Argentina elicited a single association: los desaparecidos,
the thousands of students, workers, writers, lawyers,
architects, and journalists, men and women alike,
who had "disappeared", simply vanished
without trace…. The central, compelling
question about Argentina is simply: What went wrong?
Why has Argentina failed to realize its promise?
(Rock, 1985, pp. xxi-xxii; my italics) |
There have been many
answers to that central question, but few that have
gone back far enough in history as demanded by the GAM/DP
theory of personality and creativity. There is no valid
explanation of what went right or wrong with a nation
without a clear understanding of its distant past. For
instance, in any discussion of the origins of the West,
there is no way that we can say something meaningful
without dealing first with what happened at Canossa
in 1077, Legnano/Venice in 1176/1177, Runnymede in 1215.
It is not that later positive DP events are not important,
but that their importance was prepared by the DP ideas
and agreements of those key events.
In the case of Argentina,
it is less a question of key events and agreements,
than, at first, of a UP institution, the Inquisition,
that many scholars have decided to forget or minimize,
and which in my mind must be faced squarely. Because
of this, Part II of this chapter is devoted to the evil
perpetrated by the UP of the Inquisition in Latin America,
Spain, Sicily, and the Papal States. Accordingly, my
discussion will move from Argentina, to Spain and back
to Argentina, stressing how Latin America, but especially
Argentina, suffered much more of royal/inquisitorial
UP, than Spain itself, because its distance from Europe
prevented the many liberalizing contacts that Spain
had with France, England, Italy, and Flanders, including
the contacts of war, as for instance the Peninsular
War of 1807-1814 which so strongly affected both Spain
and Portugal.
Part III, on the vertical
component of the Hispanic character is equally Spanish
at first, yet various key aspects of that vertical component
have sadly become stronger in Argentina than in Spain
itself.
Before leaving the preliminaries
of this introduction, something more must be said first
on what went wrong, and then on the aims and methods
of this chapter.
2. What Went Wrong?
·
On March 24, 1976, a junta led by Gen. Jorge Rafael
Videla seized power from President Isabel Peron.
During the next seven years, at least 8,900 people
disappeared, according to a 1985 government report,
although human rights groups place the figure at
around 30,000. [Sadly, this behavior was not new.
Already under Juan Manuel Rosas, who ruled Argentina
in 1829-1852, "one source estimates that by
1843 he had been responsible, through executions
and civil war casualties (not including the badly
wounded who would die shortly afterwards, or the
deaths inflicted by Rosas' enemies) for over 22,000
deaths" (Earle, 1971, p. 47).]
· A microcosm
of international politics, Argentina has experienced
domestically the hostilities that citizens of other
states experience mainly in the area of foreign
relations. More than any other nation, since World
War II it has been a battleground of ideas competing
for supremacy-liberalism, democracy, socialism,
communism, fascism, and the social teachings of
the Catholic church-ideologies contributing to a
climate of social and political chaos. In Argentina
their encounter reached a pitch of violence unsurpassed
in the hemisphere. Argentina can boast of the two
largest, best-organized, and best-financed urban
guerrilla formations on record-the Ejército
Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), and the Montoneros.
The response to their revolutionary war was also
record-breaking-the military's dirty war, a revival
of the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, and the
most systematic form of state terrorism in the New
World. (Hodges, 1991, p. xi) |
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