The accumulation of decisions and situations that from the hand of the human being leads to what we understand as action, is what Hannah Arendt called the Infinite Improbabilities. Only through them we can understand what is leading us to the situation we are living: the voracity of ultraliberal capitalist policies, the coincidence in time of inefficient political decisions and incompetent politicians, together with the ambitions of individuals, politicians and corporations.

Migratory flows are not a novelty for humanity: this is how we have constituted what we understand as a civilization, however, the population movements that we have been experiencing in recent years respond to economic and geopolitical strategies that in many cases are difficult to justify. The consumption needs of the industrialized countries are the pattern that marks these strategies.

All this is leading to more than 35 million people being forced to leave their homes in Africa and the Middle East alone, between 2014 and 2015, and only 14% of them are destined for an industrialised country; 86% will end up in another city in their own country or in a developing country at best. Of the more than 60 billion euros that Europe has spent in the last 5 years on containing these population movements, Spain spends 10 million a year on maintaining the fences of Ceuta and Melilla.

It is true that every day we change the world but, to make a profound change, sometimes it takes longer than a lifetime and from here again the same question: what to do? “Perhaps it is simply a matter of taking note of the gap between the power of ideas and the shock of reality, but not to express regret or some kind of nostalgia, but to return to the words, to meditate on them, which may be an excessively humble task, but one that involves wisdom, since words are the food of thought and are the only thing we often have at our disposal to respond to the shocks of the world.”*

*Hannah Arendt. What is politics? 1993 Compilation of texts for Introduction to Politics. 1959

You can find more information about Ramón Mateos here