“But If a Foreign Enemy Should Dare…”

(ENGLISH VERSION)

AI-generated image by ChatGPT

In anthropology school, classmates spent hours complaining against the Spanish. As if the conquest were five hundred years ago and today’s capitalism were not its continuation. They embittered themselves looking at the past and never touched the present.

Then I saw the flag. The coat of arms. The national anthem that says: “but if a foreign enemy should dare to profane with his foot.” The enemy it imagines is external, visible, one who sets foot on the territory. But the most dangerous enemy today is not the one who invades with boots. It is the one who controls without stepping. The one who designs the system.

The most dangerous error is the one we do not recognize. Because everything else is habit, and there lies the pattern of continuity.

Where is life in that anthem? Where is the preparation for a world where economic control is exercised from a distance, without hand-to-hand combat?

I understood something: if war and death are your symbol, prepare yourself for that. If not, find one that contains what you are and what you want to keep being.

[embed]

The human being possesses a singular capacity: not only do we react to our environment, we also imagine it and transform it. Sometimes we act in response to immediate stimuli; other times, we project possibilities, rehearse paths, and redefine our reality. In that space between the reactive and the creative lies one of our most powerful faculties: the possibility of changing things.

However, this capacity is not neutral. Change introduces tension. And that tension manifests itself, above all, in the realm of culture.

Culture can be understood as the set of patterns that organize social life: ways of thinking, acting, and relating that have been transmitted from generation to generation. These patterns are not arbitrary; they fulfill a fundamental function: they enable stability and continuity, they make survival within a given environment possible.

But what stabilizes can also become inflexible.

Over time, cultural patterns tend to become unquestionable paradigms. Thus, when change — whether internal or external — threatens those structures, conflict arises.

Perhaps the problem is not change itself, but the inflexibility with which we try to face it.

There exist materials that, far from breaking, adapt: water, which takes the shape of what contains it without ceasing to be water; gold, which can be transformed without losing its value. Both preserve their essence in the midst of transformation.

Perhaps a truly solid culture is not the most rigid, but the most flexible.

Human history offers multiple examples of tension between change and permanence. Over time, certain technological advances have allowed some groups to dominate others, not necessarily by being more fit to survive in their environment, but by possessing specific advantages that expand their control over their surroundings. This domination transforms not only territories, but also cultures.

In that process, the cultural patterns of dominated groups tend to weaken, transform, or disappear. However, they rarely vanish completely. In many cases, they condense.

It is there that the symbol appears.

The symbol can be understood as the most essential form in which a culture manages to preserve itself. It is a condensation of experience: it contains, in concentrated form, the principles that gave meaning to a way of life.

But not every symbol works. I had already seen it before, in school. And I saw it later, in every civic ceremony where we sing an anthem that trains us for death, not for life.

This idea opens a deeper question:

What if the symbol arose not only as a response to conflict? What if it could be created before rupture occurs?

If symbols are capable of condensing the experience of a culture, then they need not be limited to preserving what is at risk of being lost. They could also anticipate change, integrate the new, and prepare a society to transform without fracturing.

From this perspective, the symbol ceases to be merely a mechanism of resistance and becomes a tool of conscious adaptation.

Perhaps a culture that recognizes change as an essential part of its existence does not wait until it feels threatened to redefine itself. Perhaps it continuously builds shared symbols that condense its experience in motion. Symbols that not only look to the past but also open possibilities toward the future.

In that process, each individual becomes an active bearer of meaning. Culture is no longer only inheritance, but also constant creation.

And perhaps therein lies a different way of relating to the world: not in the inflexible defense of what was, but in the capacity to transform without losing that which gives meaning to life.

Because, in the end, the symbol is not only memory. It can also be direction.

About the author He began by writing verse, later studied Cultural Anthropology (UDLA-P) and Ethnohistory (ENAH) in Mexico, and later served as an Agent of the Federal Judicial Anti-Drug Police (INCD). His work explores human experience as the foundation for understanding culture, symbol, and transformation.