Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, “Total Revolution,” and the Roots of the Humanist Movement
2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2006-049
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America
ResumoSilo’s “sermon on the mount,” as some later called it, took place high up in the Andes mountains near Mendoza, Argentina, at midday on May 4, 1969. Days earlier, Mendoza’s municipal officials, in accordance with the national government’s restriction of civil liberties, had denied a public meeting space within the city’s limits to Silo (the pseudonym used by the Mendocino Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos) and his young followers. Rebuffed by Mendoza’s elders and seeking a space in which to assemble inconspicuously, the Siloístas formed an impromptu convoy and traveled a meandering road into the towering mountains, with inquisitive police never far behind, until they eventually gathered on a rise named Punta de Vacas. There, surrounded by rocks, dust, and shrubs, Silo and his followers engendered a youth movement whose repercussions would soon be felt strongly across the border in Chile, where profound political, social, cultural, and economic change lay on the horizon. That day at Punta de Vacas, with police observing from a short distance away, dozens of young people, mostly Chileans and Argentines, listened as Silo shared his thoughts on such things as pleasure, desire, suffering, and the violence of “philistine morality.” What they witnessed was the seminal oration — the critical moment of articulation — that defined and inspired a species of counterculture and laid the foundation for what subsequently became the Humanist movement in Chile and elsewhere.The right-wing stranglehold on Argentina’s public sphere during the late 1960s and very early 1970s forced Siloístas to meet in out-of-the-way places like Punta de Vacas, when they were able to meet at all. Meanwhile, Silo’s followers in Santiago and environs nurtured their nascent movement and formed a group called Poder Joven, or “Young Power.” Poder Joven brought together self-described revolutionaries in their midteens and twenties and from all of Chile’s urban classes — a budding generation in a turbulent, yet pluralistic and democratic, polity. Rooted in their collective aspiration to achieve a higher state of being through self-transformation, and inspired by such figures as Herbert Marcuse and G. I. Gurdjieff, Chilean Siloístas tested the official boundaries and meanings of such concepts as liberation, revolution, and socialism in their response to Silo’s call for “The Healing of Suffering” — the title of his Punta de Vacas address.1 Siloístas, simply put, rejected existing authorities and nearly all aspects of contemporary society. They did so under difficult conditions and at some risk, as they were confronted by the policing powers of both media and the state during the “Chilean road to socialism” (1970 – 73), the political project of freely elected Marxist president Salvador Allende and his Socialist- and Communist-led coalition, Popular Unity. Despite their avowed commitment to socialism, Siloístas found no allies in Popular Unity, nor did they seek any. The Marxist government, which identified itself as the embodiment, if not the pinnacle, of Chilean democracy, effectively branded the unarmed and apolitical Siloístas as enemies of the state, culture, and morality.The formation of Poder Joven and the ensuing reactions of anti-Siloístas, especially those of the orthodox Left, underscore the seriousness of a generational clash that emerged alongside, and in relation to, class struggle during the Allende years. These events also accentuate the possibilities and limitations faced by heterodox revolutionary movements under the Popular Unity government. Moreover, at the same time that Chile’s two most powerful and antagonistic sociopolitical blocs — the Allendista Left and the resourceful Right — battled for hegemony, they nevertheless demonstrated similar cultural sensibilities in their dealings with Siloísmo. Remarkably, however, historians of Chile have not paused to examine Siloísmo and what Poder Joven was, what it stood for, what it did, and what it meant in the context of tremendous social dis cord, acute political strife, and the radicalization of a great many young people.2 Speaking to this omission, in this article I will examine Siloísmo and pinpoint Poder Joven’s unique and contested position in the social, cultural, and political conflicts taking place in Chile during the early 1970s. I would like to address five interrelated questions: What were the essential ideas and practices of the Siloístas? How did those ideas and practices relate to social, cultural, political, generational, transcendental, and existential matters? Why did many Chileans see Siloísmo as a threat to society? In what ways did Popular Unity and Poder Joven advance different and irreconcilable definitions of liberation, revolution, and socialism? And what was the relationship between class struggle and generational struggle during the Allende years?While leaders of the Chilean Left decried Poder Joven’s alleged fascism, the Right warned of Siloísmo’s supposedly socialist revolutionary objectives. Most everyone branded Siloístas as cultural outcasts, social deviants, drug addicts, perverts, pedophiles, and kidnappers, and Silo’s associates were investigated, persecuted, and jailed during the Allende years. Forces representing the most vivid shades of Chile’s political spectrum feared the spread of Poder Joven. Popular Unity’s principals grew concerned by, among other things, Siloísmo’s discourse of generational struggle and its call for absolute liberation — of the mind, body, and spirit — which clashed with key precepts of the nation’s Marxist leadership and those of other important social interests. While Siloístas held that individual liberation would lead to collective liberation, Marxists believed the opposite. More politically conservative Chileans, meanwhile, also criticized Siloísmo in the strongest of terms during the Popular Unity government, and the subsequent military regime took Poder Joven quite seriously — likely due to the negative press about the Siloístas during the Allende years. Although it never counted with more than one hundred core members and another one or two hundred fellow travelers, Poder Joven apparently seemed much larger than it really was, a fact that we can attribute to media reports, police investigations, and the assiduous propaganda efforts of Siloístas themselves, whose graffiti and symbol (a triangle inside a circle) were as ubiquitous as they were recognizable.3Although they faced considerable adversity, highlighted by the arrest and imprisonment of prominent members during the Allende years and under the military regime that followed, Poder Joven spread beyond Chile and the Southern Cone. Young Chileans took Silo’s teachings abroad during the Popular Unity era, and some escaped the violence of Chile’s 1973 coup by virtue of their peregrination.4 A dozen years after Allende’s overthrow, exiled Siloístas returned to Chile — many for the first time since the coup — to participate in the country’s gradual transition to democracy. In the mid-1980s, they founded the Humanist Party to champion progressive political and social change, human rights, and environmentalism, and Humanists assumed roles in government after the dictatorship. Internationally, meanwhile, Siloísmo took on other names, including “The Community” and “The Movement.” By the 1990s, Siloístas had become organized into Humanist political movements and parties in more than one hundred countries.The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of extraordinary ambition around the world. Utopias were pursued, including those imagined by revolutionaries pledged to end exploitation. Things once considered either implausible or outright impossible — such as space exploration — became real. In this setting, scores of young people in places like Berkeley, Mexico City, Paris, and even in Santiago generated countercultural currents characterized by sexual liberation, reconceptualized gender and gendered relations, a particular material culture, drug use, demands for political and cultural democratization, and opposition to all war.5 These young people made known their alienation by expressing, through various forms of collectivism and straightforward defiance, their counterhegemonic sensibilities based on desires for liberation. In Chile, where the first sign of widespread youth activism in the 1960s was a student movement to reform the nation’s largest universities, the purveyors and practitioners of counterculture were seen regularly on the streets of the capital and elsewhere by the end of the decade.6 In this context, Poder Joven essentially developed as an esoteric fragment of the Chilean counterculture, sharing a peculiar milieu with other youth-based trends, including the more recognizable form that Chileans called hippismo.7In Santiago’s metropolitan region, many middle- and upper-class Chilean hippies — young men and women in their teens and twenties — frequented cafés and stores in the upscale municipality of Providencia, while those of lesser economic means typically congregated in the downtown’s Parque Forestal and at other venues in the capital’s central and western sectors. Regardless of class or place, Chile’s hippies listened to the music of such homegrown beat and hippie bands as Aguaturbia, Los Picapiedras, and Los Blops. Providencia hippies and Parque Forestal hippies read many of the same pop-culture magazines, sported similar hairstyles, and were very aware of foreign counterculture(s) that brought to Chile various clothing styles, music, and vocabularies, as well as an overall onda, or vibe, that many young Chileans found compelling. Broadly speaking, hippies created — by means of clothing, hairstyles, hangouts, marijuana use, language, music, and sexuality — an identifiable culture delineated as much or more by consumption patterns as anything. Chilean hippies sought to emulate U.S. hippies in many respects, especially after a well-publicized Woodstock documentary appeared in Santiago movie houses in September 1970.8Although rightist, centrist, and leftist critics greeted hippismo with many of the same accusations, condemnations, and unflattering epithets — some perhaps well deserved — that were hurled at Poder Joven, hippies and Siloístas were dissimilar in important ways. Indeed, it will become evident that Siloísmo eschewed some of hippismo’s most recognized markers (real or perceived), including recreational drug use, but retained other aspects of countercultural thought and practice.The Chilean counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Siloísmo included) is best described as a conglomeration of currents that in many respects flouted the conventions of society, culture, and politics that were defined and defended in varying ways by the institutions and voices representing most everyone else. It lacked official political space — by default or desire — but nevertheless made such issues as drug use and sexual freedom more conspicuous in a country with a notably conservative cultural history and a polarizing and fracturing body politic. To be sure, the diffuse and consumerist counterculture that was hippismo generated a much larger following than did Poder Joven, but a casual perusal of leading newspapers and magazines published during the Popular Unity years would lead one to think otherwise. Despite its cultural and political importance during the Allende years, hippismo is outside this article’s scope. Significant here is that while most Chileans in, say, 1971 might not have been able to distinguish between hippismo and Siloísmo, Poder Joven offered the young Chilean a more ideologically defined and esoteric alternative to hippismo. Siloísmo, in short, espoused a specific doctrine that drew the attention of the state and powerful constituencies in civil society, notwithstanding Poder Joven’s small size. Silo’s brief speech at Punta de Vacas expressed the bare essentials of that doctrine.In a 1971 interview with the Chilean leftist youth magazine Ramona, Silo accused “los cerdos” (“the pigs,” or people in positions of authority, especially police and government officials) of labeling his Punta de Vacas address a “sermon on the mount” in order to give it an unwarranted and unwanted messianic overtone.9 “The important thing was to talk to the young people,” Silo told Ramona in Mendoza. “Then the pigs got scared. It’s logical. Because the cordobazo happened twenty days later. We could smell it coming, you know.”10 Referring to the student and worker uprising that shook Córdoba, Argentina, in late May 1969, Silo described a larger upheaval in the making, led by a new and innovative generation of young people victimized by prevailing institutions and destructive ideas that defined their inner and outer worlds.11 In essence, Silo drew on the cordobazo to underscore the growing militancy of youths who, he said, desired a transformation in their lives that went beyond the economic and the political. Indeed, in the Ramona interview Silo prognosticated a “new revolution against everything that is.” Young people, he explained, “don’t participate in anything, and they are the only ones capable of making a real revolution.”12 Put broadly, Siloísmo asserted that in order to achieve the transformative possibilities and promise of such a revolution, one had to begin by elaborating a liberating psychology, one derived from an organic process of self-discovery and understanding — a new epistemology — that would produce a more humane cosmology. Inner change, if realized, would then be expressed in the outer world as pacifism, freedom, and a particular form of socialism made real and fostered by the younger generation.Some 15 – 20 minutes long, “The Healing of Suffering” began with a simple declaration: “If you have come to hear a man because you think he will communicate wisdom, you are on the wrong path, because real wisdom is not conveyed by way of books or speeches; real wisdom is in the depth of your consciousness, just as real love is in the depth of your heart.”13 Silo then spelled out his understanding of suffering, noting that besides the physical dimension of suffering (from hunger or a wound), there exists a “strictly mental suffering,” which “is always rooted in the violence that exists in your own consciousness.” He explained that one suffers “because you fear losing what you have, or because you lack, or because you fear in general. These, then, are the great enemies of humankind: fear of sickness, fear of poverty, fear of death, fear of loneliness. All of these sufferings are in your mind.” Silo connected suffering and its source — a violence within the mind — to the destructive power of human desire. “The more violent a person is,” he warned, “the more crude, the more base are that person’s desires.” Such “inner violence,” nourished by desire, naturally leads to violence in the “outside” world, as humans driven by desire (for goods, social status, political power) inflict violence on others. Physical violence is an obvious extension of desire’s command, Silo argued, as is “economic violence,” which “is the violence through which you exploit others.” Economic violence occurs “when you steal from another person, when you are no longer a brother or sister to others, and when you become a bird of prey who feeds upon other people.”14 Poder Joven’s conception of economic violence, developed by Silo at Punta de Vacas, later framed the movement’s peculiar socialism, which focused on the psychological bases for economic and social justice rather than a materialist interpretation of social being.Silo’s attention to suffering and desire took him beyond a critique of economic conditions to denounce racism and religious intolerance, as well as to condemn what he called “philistine morality,” which he saw as symptoms of brutish desire: “You wish to impose your way of life upon another person; you wish to impose your vocation on another person. But who has told you that you are an example to be followed? Who has told you that you can impose your way of life because it pleases you? What makes your way of life a model, and what makes it a pattern that you have the right to impose on others? This, then, is another form of violence.” He went on to warn his audience, “There is no politics that can solve this mad urge for violence. There is no political party or movement on the planet that can end the violence.” Silo then suggested that young people should be wary of any group or institution that promises to rectify grievous worldly conditions through traditional means: political reform or revolution, the restructuring of economies, the creation of welfare states, and so forth. Without a transformative process within the self, which nullifies desire and brings about true joy and love that will “elevate your spirit” and “elevate your body,” authentic change in all areas of human experience — true and expansive liberation — cannot unfold.15 Such self-transformation would be the result of meditation guided by the teachings and coaching of those whose minds are free.The ideas that Silo expressed at Punta de Vacas and that Siloístas subsequently elaborated expose a complicated intellectual synthesis influenced appreciably by Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and G. I. Gurdjieff, among others, as well as by libertarian-anarchist thought. While an exhaustive examination of Siloísmo’s many intellectual components is beyond this article’s scope, it is useful to pause and consider at least some of the sources from which Silo and Poder Joven very clearly drew inspiration.Marcuse’s intellectual presence was obvious from Siloísmo’s inception. His writing was regularly quoted and paraphrased (without citation, usually) in Poder Joven’s most notable literature, and his books were on the must-read lists supplied to prospective members.16 After he took up residence in New York in the late 1930s, Marcuse directly grappled with Freud, psychoanalysis, and (more to the point) the interrelatedness of self and society, as he (along with fellow members of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research) pondered the psychological barriers to real social change, combining Marxist deductions with Freudian insight.17 Silo’s “Healing of Suffering” addressed the self-society relationship by positing that social change would take place only in relation to a psychological transformation within the individual. Indeed, the Punta de Vacas speech suggested that new pleasures of and for the mind and body — a more authentic state of joy and love — would arise from psychological metamorphosis. This echoed, to some extent, Marcuse’s 1938 defense of hedonistic philosophies and their focus on happiness, although he (as well as Poder Joven) rejected hyperindividualism in view of a concern with social totality and the generality of social theory.18Other elements in Marcusean thought, and especially Marcuse’s views on liberation and economy, apparently swayed Poder Joven in significant ways. In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse faults the bourgeois ideology of love, which represses freedom and pleasure through such social norms as monogamy and as a result limits the psychological potential for freedom.19One-Dimensional Man (1964), moreover, addresses the tremendous power of economic structures, which he sees as preventing the expression of freedom, choice, and self-determination. Liberty is illusory, Marcuse argues, for those embedded in the existing capitalist system (directed by the U.S. and Western Europe) or in the communist reality of the USSR; in either context, existence is conditioned completely by various psychological and institutional mechanisms of standardization and restraint. In other words, Marcuse contends that existing capitalist and communist systems — their political expressions included — fail humanity by negating true equality and liberation. This notion anticipated Poder Joven’s rejection of all contemporary political projects.20 That said, Marcuse in the 1960s looked to marginal groups (students in particular) for leadership in creating and deploying new and truly liberating revolutionary formulae that would destroy what he saw as the “oppressive totalization that was contemporary society,” as one scholar put it.21 Silo and the Siloístas, for all intents and purposes, developed one such innovative revolutionary formula.In Siloísmo, additionally, one can discern reflections of ideas expressed decades earlier by Reich and Fromm, whose translated works also circulated among Poder Joven’s members.22 Reich’s writings discuss sexual instincts, sexual repression, and destructive tendencies, arguing that sexual liberation was central to the realization of a liberated self and the mitigation of outward aggression and violence.23 He believed that nearly all repression was grounded in sexual repression, and Reich thus advocated psychological liberation based almost exclusively on sexual freedom and the transformative capacity of the orgasm. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, it should be noted, criticizes Reich for offering a strikingly reductive interpretation of what constitutes liberation. Marcuse makes it clear that sexual liberation could not be an end in and of itself but rather should be a component of a much more amplified liberating psychology.24 It will become evident that Poder Joven took Marcuse’s position on the matter but accepted Reich’s basic argument about the transformative potential of sexuality, as well as his general approach to the interrelatedness of the self, destructive tendencies, and liberation.Fromm, like Reich, contemplated the self and destructive tendencies, and his views were integrated into Siloísmo’s synthesis as expressed at Punta de Vacas and elsewhere. Silo’s conception of violence, for example, resembles Fromm’s notion of destruction. As Fromm argues in The Fear of Freedom (1942), “The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”25 The Punta de Vacas address implored a generation to realize a “drive towards life,” thereby depriving society of an impulse toward violence, an obvious form of destructiveness. Important, too, is that Fromm appreciated socialism not for its economic basis but rather for a certain spirit inherent in it — a “humanism” — that broke down the barriers between individual and society and valued the human condition.26Supplementing the ideas of Marcuse, Reich, and Fromm in Poder Joven’s philosophical library, and external to prevailing variants of Marxism, were Gurdjieff’s esoteric and proto – New Age teachings.27 Crafted mostly during the 1920s and 1930s, Gurdjieff’s body of work relates to the identification and facilitation of true consciousness; his conceptions of authenticity and humanity influenced Silo’s and Siloístas’ views on psychology and society.28 With special interest in astrology, phenomenology, and pre-Christian history, the Armenian-born writer contemplated a more “real” state of being that would allow humans to experience the ideal union of body and mind — physical sensation, sentiment, and reason — as well as truly comprehend their individual places in the cosmos. Gurdjieff, in effect, believed that most humans sleepwalk through life, clinging to an illusion of individualism and to a false consciousness created largely by forces — people, institutions, ideas — outside the self. The act of waking, in turn, comes only through the exhaustive examination of the self and the development of a full awareness of what may be called the body-mind, or a total understanding of “I am.” Simply put, what Gurdjieffians call “The Way” rests on the transformation of the self, with the result being a genuinely lived life.29 The Siloístas of Poder Joven imagined positive and progressive social and material outcomes of such a self-transformative process, as the Punta de Vacas speech shows. In sum, the one concept that transects the ideas of Marcuse, Gurdjieff, Fromm, and Reich — and that became Poder Joven’s ideological keystone — is the realization of the lived life, which determined the Siloísta subject’s relation to and interaction with all inhabitants, environments, and material conditions of the outside world.Argentine and Chilean anarchists’ antistructuralist approaches to liberation also influenced Siloísmo noticeably. Facilitated by immigration from Italy and Spain, a strong anarchist tradition emerged in Argentina toward the end of the nineteenth century, and libertarian ideas spread to Chile by way of printed sources and Chileans’ contact with Argentine workers and intellectuals.30 Anarchism found significant support within the Chilean labor movement between the turn of the century and the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, after which Marxism grew to overshadow it in Chile’s working-class circles.31 Generally speaking, anarchism — in rejecting politics, capitalism, and hierarchies of all kinds, and in taking a stance with regard to gender equity, women’s sexual oppression, and women’s mobilization for revolutionary goals — anticipated much of what Siloístas had to say about their particular form of revolution.32 Important here, then, is that libertarian revolutionary thought has a long history in the Southern Cone, and (as we shall see) Silo and his followers very clearly wove anarchist threads into their philosophical fabric.During the first year of the Allende government, a small circle of Chilean Siloístas elaborated what they called the School of Liberation based on a series of books by one “H. Van Doren” — a person who never existed. The Allende-era press often identified Bruno von Ehremberg, a leading voice of Poder Joven, as the real H. Van Doren. But it was Silo, with the assistance of a handful of Siloís-tas in Santiago (Von Ehremberg among them), who wrote under the pseudonym and produced Poder Joven’s most important publications, including Manual del Poder Joven, Silo y la liberación, and Exordio del Poder Joven, all first published in Santiago in 1971 by a new and Siloísta-funded publisher aptly named Transmutation.33 For the Siloístas, Chile during the Allende years was a somewhat permissive, yet inhospitable, place. A democratic society with strong revolutionary impulses, it was still shot through with a conservative cultural heritage. Regardless of Chile’s pluralistic tradition and the revolutionary political environment of the early 1970s, Silo’s followers soon found out just how troubling their understandings of such things as liberation, revolution, and socialism were to Popular Unity — which, in the leftist press and elsewhere, routinely called for mobilizing the country’s youth in the building of socialism. Indeed, that Poder Joven preached liberation in the broadest sense, as well as generational struggle, in effect challenged Popular Unity’s “Chilean road to socialism.” Siloístas, in short, opposed Popular Unity’s materialist project for the nation and, although they were self-proclaimed socialists, denied the relevance of Marxism’s most basic component: class struggle. The Siloísta movement also rejected party politics, labor unionism, and any other structures of the ruling generation — until the 1980s, at least.Guided by Silo’s teachings set forth at Punta de Vacas and in early Siloísta literature but not commanded or micromanaged by the charismatic Mendocino, Poder Joven’s members used Silo’s general philosophical system to interpret their social, cultural, economic, and political present, thereby applying Siloísta thought and practice in a particular national context.34 What developed in Chile, then, was an idiosyncratic Siloísta literature that differed in practical ways, by virtue of space, time, and circumstance, from other variants that arose in and outside Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, Poder Joven’s literature centered not only on Silo’s teachings but also on the individuals, groups, ideas, and things around which a Chilean national debate swirled. Manual del Poder Joven was the seminal publication of that Chilean Siloísmo, and it focused on the possibilities and promise of revolutionizing the self at a time when some Chileans were building Popular Unity’s road to socialism while others were attempting to destroy it.Manual del Poder Joven is just that: a manual or guidebook for what H. Van Doren called “total revolution.”35 Critical of all forms of coercion (including U.S. imperialism), private property, and bourgeois morality and enthused by the revolutionary potential of young Latin Americans, the book begins by condemning the Left’s party apparatus (Popular Unity) for choosing to reform but preserve bourgeois democracy rather than to undertake a bona fide revolution. On this specific point, Van Doren explains that Siloístas agreed with the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), an organization of young Marxists inspired by the Cuban Revolution who sought to replace Allende’s constitutional and pluralistic “road to socialism” with a radical and immediate social transformation. However, the pacifist Siloístas detested the MIR’s increasing calls for revolutionary violence during the Allende years, as well as its idea of revolution (one of and for the working class), which, in 1971, led Silo to call Miristas “pendejos,” in a reaffirmation of Siloísmo’s rejection of violence as a tool for change.36 To Siloístas, only the healing of suffering, the transformation of the self, and the end of psychological violence, as Silo termed it at Punta de Vacas, would truly address grievous social and economic problems.The transformation of the self leads to meaningful and just worldly outcomes, Van Doren argues, and such outcomes would be the result of a peaceful yet revolutionary and generational struggle led by young people who shed the compulsion of
Referência(s)