Consciousness is the way in which the big bang that gave rise to the universe occurs within us. Everything that exists outside is lighting up inside us, on the great map of our consciousness. And also realities that do not exist, desirable or frightening. She is also the stone on which everyone engraves their personal version of the Ten Commandments. In this sense, it is up to her to govern the course of a human biography. The great works of art, the scientific discoveries, the generous revolutions, and also many horrors, have been born in the miracle of a free conscience.
However, today human consciousness is not valued. We are replacing it with another mechanism: that of the infinite external surveillance of people through constant evaluations. A technician comes to fix the Wi-Fi at home, and the next day they send us an e-mail to find out if the man has behaved. One picks up his car at the workshop, and two days later they call us from the headquarters to check if everything has gone well. We pay something in the supermarket, and in the same terminal where we insert the bank card they invite us to evaluate the cashier. The customer becomes an informer, and little is entrusted to the conscience of the employee. It's as if it didn't exist.
In many companies, the worker has to sell his soul to the devil of the commercial objectives that have been established and that become his fierce personal decalogue. On the other hand, the national states kneel before the rating agencies, paying them so that they give them a safe-conduct that allows them to dance the sovereign debt waltz without major setbacks. And, within the state structures, constant evaluation devices have been created, which, for the most part, are forms of pressure, surveillance or the unceremoniously imposing of certain political objectives.
In Portugal, in education, evaluations punish schools that do not present themselves with a very high level of approval. A few years ago, Portugal was the Western European country where the fewest people had completed secondary school. This felt like a shame. The state evaluations press for those European standards to be achieved at all costs, although many diplomas are false. And something else happens: forced by law to evaluate themselves, universities invent extremely complicated systems, labyrinthine computer platforms, in which professors communicate what they have done, and in the end almost all of us leave with marks of "outstanding" and "very good".
Faced with these baroque farces or with the political pressure that is reflected in many evaluations, the conscience of each person is worth much more. I still believe in it, and I am guided by my conscience, respecting that of others. Woe to me if I were fanatically guided by the standards established for my work: I would become a sad puppet of governmental whims. A machine of producing futility. Also, when we act based on the best of our conscience, that nebula of infinite surveillance that surrounds us ends up proving us right.
I believe that the current powers consider that within us there is only a rock of selfishness, a vine of interests growing on the wall of each biography, and that this rock or that weed must be controlled through constant vigilance. What a sad vision of the human being. Basically, it is as if we were circus animals that must be threatened with the whip so that they jump through the appropriate hoops of fire.
Of course, the act of evaluating can be positive, and I evaluate my students, and they evaluate me, but these evaluations actually represent a dialogue of consciences. I tell the student what I think of his work, and he also tells me about his journey, his evolution in the subject, which entails an appreciation of my work. This has nothing to do with those ice graphs that they put us in today, handcuffing our lives.
My advice to the reader, who may be evaluating someone or being evaluated by another person, is to trust your conscience. This is not an archaism, but a human eternity. Consciously, we will be able to overthrow the evaluation dictatorship that is being built and that, deep down, is nothing more than the holy inquisition that has invented planetary money so that we can all dance to the sound of its tambourine.
