Human Capital: Democracy’s First Power.

Part 2.
EDITORIAL Primer Poder AC – Board of Directors

As said in previous editorials, Culture is the Spiritual Software that decides

What-To-Do or Not-To-Do, thus defining personal o massive behaviors. Human
Capital is about human quality, by which behavior becomes its instrument.
Thereby, such is the capital that builds Life quality, personal or collective.

Then, why do modern societies pay so little attention to human quality massive
training, by not giving it the value as the primary capital of all factors that affect
our Life systems' quality? Shall we keep blaming leaders' mistakes or ourselves
by accepting as "normal" the lack of human quality values that decapitalize our
lives, therefore, our societies?

Hidden influencers.

Most people ignore the underlying values that influence our countries' cultures
or Human Capital behaviors. Some even belong to a far past.

Religion is one of such software or behavior’s input just as homes, schools, and
modern media should do. However, in modern times, we concentrate our
attention more on training technical knowledge, than on the main force that
drives our behavior: The Spirit.

History shows the importance of the spiritual software or cultural influence on

people’s behavior - usually when such software is poorly trained as it results
from imitating collective habits.

For instance, from the 16th Century, when inside the Christian-Catholic world,
some groups -in protest- decided to separate from the Roman Catholic Church's
vision and practices, in Christian-Protestant culture countries (most of which
owned modest natural resources), personal importance was measured through
daily hard work (any work) when this belief became a social value as it was
sustained by a religious duty (like Sundays Mass). Such a value became
institutionalized in the proverb: Idle hands are the devil's tools.

During the same period, in the former Spanish Empire – the Christian-Catholic
religion's most powerful defender and once the owner of the largest gold and
silver reserves on the planet- existed a belief among their upper-class people
that hard work was denigrating. Such an idea became a belief in their culture as
it inspired the proverb: Manual labor is malign. In 1783, Emperor Charles III of
Spain failed to reverse this belief by proclaiming it as a misvalue.

Can you tell which of these two cultures, throughout history, has developed the
Human Capital that nowadays owns the best living standards in the world? In
those countries that once were colonies of the Spanish Empire, how many
people with Power maintain the non-working (or most selfish) attitude as an
upper-class standard that sets a "due behavior"? The answer might lead us to -
part of the reasons- why after centuries of their Independence, such nations
remain dominated by backwardness, corruption, and poverty.

Freedom is a spiritual value that cannot be sold at any price.

History tells how much Freedom costs. For those currently living under its
systems, it seems like they have forgotten their nations could have reached it
after 96% (and even 99%) of human existence. No wonder this is the most costly
Human Capital asset that exists, and worst of all, most do not care about its
value by giving money and technical knowledge (to earn money) supremacy
upon any other asset. Ask those who lost Freedom about the difference in their
living quality without such personal power and how much it costs to recover it.
Still, some risk it or even sell it for money.

How can people lose or sell their Freedom? On our personal and massive
behavior, how influential are rational values compared to spiritual ones?

Technical knowledge is needed. No doubt. However, we lose our freedom when

becoming rationally programmed robots, adoring quantitative values. Such
behavior first reduces us to blindfolded submissive objects that -by ignoring
quality values- drive us to lose what provides our best living quality. See how.

A threat to our future living quality and freedom systems is how we deteriorate
Human Capital by imposing materialism in high personal standards. Most
people aim for quantitative factors than for human quality values because this is
what we exalt as success in academic, economic and any power environment,
except when such values represent money or votes (in a democratic system).

See how Free World societies (and States) show comfy acceptance when our
people lose jobs because (such) successful investors open factories in China to
increase their profits by reducing costs - even when such maneuver weakens
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Democracy’s economic balance, the critical pillar of the Freedom political system
that provides such investors’ technology WITH wealth – not only, wealth.

Without Freedom’s Human Capital, there is no self-owned technology or

wealth.

The world knows that China's lower costs come from a fierce autocracy that sets
massive slavery as the dominant manufacturing factor. So, what sort of welfare
do the Chinese people get to motivate the personal creativity that drives an own
technologic capital? None! This economy, the world's second-largest
manufacturing capacity, suffers severe weaknesses. The main one is that its
operation, maintenance, and growth, hang on foreign technology and
international markets.

Chinese strategists believed that global power domination comes from material
wealth, not Human Capital and Freedom. During the Covid Pandemic, they had
to temporarily close manufacturing facilities as their primary operational input,
their slaves (human beings, after all) could disappear by death cause. Of course,
such a closing affected the Free World economy, which (finally) woke up to such
dependence on Chinese manufacturing, gradually reducing such weakness by
re-opening their original facilities - thus recovering lost job positions and free
economies strengths. Covid demonstrated real-world strengths and weaknesses.
China is already paying for such mistakes.

Free World's technology is in permanent and unlimited growth as a result of a

competition driven by personal motivation, generated by their cultures (spiritual
software) and protected by their Freedom's legal systems. Free Will to act, to do,
and even to choose between options is the key that opens doors to welfare and
development, either in personal or collective terms. These are Human Capital’s
strengths that have lead these countries to the Top Living quality positions.

Another case of welfare killed by imposing profits over Freedom.

Media is so influential that it could replace schools and homes as quality values’
learning centers. Such social objective is usually challenged (and defeated) by
media corporates (successful) executives as it steals money profits opportunities.
Only by focusing on quantitative factors, such Media owners and executives
forget that non-educated (rationally weak and socially indifferent) people may
destroy private businesses when voting for Freedom enemies.

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Take note of the Venezuelan case where a criminal gang -through a
disinformation campaign- won the ’98 election because of private Media
support that did not oppose such fraud as long as it could bring juicy profits.
Only a few years after 1998, their businesses were confiscated only by using the
democratic right of confronting the State – the one which was already under the
absolute control of such gangsters' dictatorship. Present profits prevailed over
their future freedom. How efficient (and successful) were these profit hunters?

CONCLUSION.

From all the previous, we might conclude that history only assures that poor
Human Capital leads to poor fate. Instead of concentrating on quantifiable
assets, shall we do something different, like improving ourselves quality to get a
better future?