Things are not like that, things are like that. This phrase was recorded when I heard Gorka Urbizu's full and quiet album. I thought I'd made a great discovery with that identification, innocent! Later I realized that, besides being a motto for merchandising, it is an incomparable treasure that has given rise to many reflections in society. Given the difficulties or problems that each one may have, Urbizu's words have suggested to me that there are paths for change, that the door of hope is open.

The complex change we are undergoing in the global world was defined by American researcher Jamais Cascio as a fragile, non-linear, and unintelligible BANI paradigm (the abbreviation of the words brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible). This situation can undoubtedly have multiple individual repercussions. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are no clear alternatives to vulnerable, lost and unheading life. To put it mildly, the mass propaganda industry is geared to the distribution of people, to the promotion of individual consumption. Somehow, the binomial of the world you and your cell phone, you and your big business, as if you and your TV were. The global hegemonic system does not want organized workers, it does not want the union of equals. On the contrary, it wants to separate us, desperate for things to be like this.

Following all these reflections, I came across a book in which Noam Chomsky and Pepe Mujica dialogue. One is an American scholar and one is a Uruguayan politician, both from the left and activists. Saul Alvídrez, founder of the Mexican student movement of 2012, presents a gem that collects reflections to survive in the twenty-first century. They talk about the resistance of the past and the present, about the failures and achievements of the past, and also about those we will need in the future. Among them, there is one that sews up many anecdotes and ideas: the need for a cultural conflict in favour of collaboration and against egoism. They say that this requires a review of the Left’s approach. In a way, the Left that historically aspires to nostalgia, the need to look and act in the long term the challenges of the future, without fear of failure.

I am convinced that those who first claimed the right to vote for women would listen on several occasions to the same speech: things are like this. Even when African-American citizens reinforced their civil rights movement. In addition to the well-known examples, the list of others who have been in resistance since childhood is as wide as ours. The privileged will always be inflexible with change, will always have a discourse elaborated for immobilism. The work of those on the other side of privilege will be to dismantle the discourse from what seems unalterable. And that will certainly be a collective practice.

As highlighted in the book, many political decisions are far from the conclusions drawn from science. And at the same time, many of those decisions, under the interests of the market. In this sense, the appeal to the informed and committed society is repeated on several occasions. We are often told that we are talking about things that cannot be changed, with a head full of utopias. But as the referents who have opened the way before us would tell us, we will not find free thoughts with the limits of others.