“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing”. The poet Archilochus thus defined the two ways of finding meaning in our existences – which have no more than what each one knows how to give – through knowledge .
From the definition, Isaiah Berlin built a splendid essay on the great thinkers that, saving the considerable – I’m afraid – distances, we could extend to our politicians today. Each of us is, in his lifestyle, a hedgehog or a fox; live with map or compass; them, too.
Political foxes, and Pedro Sánchez is one, know about many things, but the right thing about each one so as not to get lost. If you go by compass, you may seek only happiness; but for them it is inseparable from a power that is increasingly personal and with less ideological coordinates.
Despising the map makes them agile, direct, fresh, unpredictable. It frees them from the script, but exposes them to overacting. They are masters of the blow, but sometimes it ends up being a shot in the foot.
Hedgehogs, on the other hand, know a lot or almost everything about one thing. They are opponents, technocrats, predictable planners, faithful to the map that drew their ambitions or those of their parents from childhood. Feijóo, like Rajoy, is a hedgehog waiting in the harbor – even if some confuse patience with laziness – for the winds to change towards power.
Sánchez looks for the waves and braves the storm. Perhaps he hits it with the compass of ambition, the cunning of the fox and the stroke of the rudder of audacity; or perhaps improvisation will degenerate into suicidal gesticulation. We’ll see.
Feijóo, meanwhile, digs his map to find out the issues that will make him win before the court of the polls when his time comes. And maybe it would come. But for Feijóo the danger is not Sánchez, but the fox who goes in his own boat, with his own compass and the freedom to find his life and the route of someone who has, for all his intellectual baggage, a lot of instinct and a lot rush This is the only way to reach La Moncloa from the management of a Twitter account. And the regatta would be even more fun if it weren’t for us, velis nolis, the rowers.