The Cuban pernicious habit of unanimity.

The British communist side of politics.

As democracy has evolved it has shown a distinct characteristic. It tends to transition from a politics of unanimity and of a consensual monolithic majority to a politics of plurality and disagreeable minorities.

In Cuba, we keep blaming the Castro regime for Cuban inability to transition to a more plural and disagreeable society. Yet, the reality is that Cubans have enjoyed the pleasant and also fastidious effects of unanimous agreeability long before Fidel Castro brought such pernicious habits to Cubans.

No doubt, communist and socialist ideas let themselves naturally to this culture of abrasive unanimity, but such habits do not have its origins in them. On the contrary, the rates of unanimity have been mutually shared by different social groups in history regardless of communism. Yet, at the time Fidel Castro gained political relevance in Cuba, Cubans were ready for the kind of unanimity he had in mind.

The communist unanimity was, no doubt, an external import, but it brought the so much needed bonds that a fragmented, “do as you please” and “nobody cares” Cuba has never experienced. To understand the current levels of dissent and disagreeability of Cubans with their current government it is of utmost relevance assessing the spectrum of unanimity that many Cuban are still very much satisfied with regardless of their current one carrying the stigmas of the Castro family.

If what Cubans in Cuba and outside Cuba wanted were to transition to a society of less unanimity, call it liberal or capitalist, and to a society of more plurality, then the challenge is not to question if Cubans will ever have free elections or if the opposition will ever be legalized or not. The challenge is to truly measure Cubans current levels of agreeability and of unanimity. That is the true challenge and not being obsessed with the Cuban government and its repressive policies. That is a distraction, even when worth addressing.

It seems to me that Cuban’s pernicious habits of agreeability in general and especially the one connected to the heritage of Fidel Castro is still unanimous by and large inside the island. Now, you can blame the communist regime all you want, but it is not hard to discover by visiting Cuba and living there that Cuban culture and its way of life, despite of the level of social fragmentation, is still trapped by the agreeability and the unanimity inertia even before considering any political matter.

Cuba is still trapped by pernicious habits of unanimity and not of plurality. This is due not fundamentally to his current communist government, although it shares a big piece of the blame, but to a long history of national homogeneity and re-engineering of identity under a common foreign threat.

Jameela Jamil is a British actress, radio presenter, model, writer, and activist. You would not expect her to share the pernicious habits of unanimity I just referred to in relation to Cuban culture, but she actually offers us in the video below precisely the wishy-washy side of unanimity.

In countries like Cuba, you still can experience unanimity and consensus not only when it comes to politics, but also when it comes to any other topic of general interest. But then, that is why Cuba is such a totalitarian country.

This in no way indicates that unanimity is bad per se, but simply that when unanimity is more the norm than plurality and disagreeability eventually something is going to go against individual freedom.

Equality and plurality are not good per se. When plurality is more the norm than unanimity and agreeability eventually something is going to go against collective unity and social balance. That’s why I n the Western world unanimity is a non-existing asset and at best is an endangered one due to an excessive plurality of choices and the fragmented nature of agreeability.

In the video, however, Jameela Jamil grants herself the right to refer to a “we” that somehow without any explanation nor data to back it up represents unanimously women in general. And not only that. Jameela, in a lighthearted outburst of entitlement, also grants herself the right to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to knowing what is to be a woman. She doesn’t tell us that it is her opinion about women, no way. Her vision of women, as a woman herself, is the model to follow by women, else such women “is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

And you might still wonder, how in a pluralistic society like Great Britain there are still women out there with such delusional entitlement to such extend that they consider their views as representing unanimously the values of women in general?

Well, such society is plural to the extent that Jameela’s non-pluralistic view can have a go too. On the other hand, plurality in Britain, like in any other Western country, is not at all time plural. In fact, Western societies go through constant phases of homogenizations, which often challenge assumed standards of democracy and plurality.

Jameela tells us:

“The double agent of the patriarchy is basically just a woman who perhaps unknowingly is still putting the patriarchy narrative out into the world.”

Let’s assume that patriarchy in the sense most feminists define it, namely, as the systematic oppression of women by men throughout history had a valid point. We, however, know that oppression comes from other sources than that of gender, namely, from the power of an idea to replicate and spread to such levels of unanimous agreeability that it ends up systematically oppressing others’ ideas.

You can see by now where is this heading. What most feminists use to describe as patriarchy does not necessarily relate to men but to any human force that oppresses as a result of monopolizing society’s consensus. Jameela, in several instances of her speech not only tried to monopolize Britain’s consensus about what it means to be a woman but she systematically throughout her speech tried to bluntly ignore any woman’s view that clashes with her.

This, unfortunately for Jameela, forces her in her own words, unknowingly, to create not only her own brand of being a double agent of patriarchy but also her own brand of being “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Most feminist rhetoric about patriarchy ends up biting their own tail and failing to have a pluralistic approach to women’s identity.

In Western societies, most people struggle to normalize their view and gain consensus, while others feel entitled to think of their view, not only as a consensus for others to follow but as the model for ignoring other views which are taken as of low standards. The patterns of domination being criticized by Jameela under the slogan of “constructive criticism” are the very patterns that relapse into a new brand of oppression.

Thus, communism is an extreme example of pernicious unanimity ideology but we still can witness pernicious unanimity ideologies in a non-communist country like Great Britain as with Jameela Jamil. This gives us hope about Cubans freeing themselves from such pernicious ideology when we discover that its cause is not only rooted in hardcore totalitarian regimes.