Consciousness is the way in which the big bang that gave rise to the universe has become within us. Everything that is outside is being created inside us, in the great map of our consciousness. And also realities that don’t 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. Great works of art, scientific discoveries, 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. We collect the car at the workshop, and after two days they call us from the headquarters to check if everything went well. We pay something at the supermarket, and at the same terminal where we insert the bank card we are invited to evaluate the cashier. The customer becomes an informer, and little is trusted to the conscience of the employee. It’s as if it doesn’t exist.
In many companies, the worker has to sell his soul to the devil of the commercial objectives that have been established and which are transformed into his fierce personal decalogue. On the other hand, the national states kneel before the rating agencies, and pay them so that they give them a good conduct that allows them to dance the sovereign debt waltz without stumbling too much. And, within the state structures, constant evaluation devices have been created, which, for the most part, are forms of pressure, surveillance or the reckless imposition of certain political objectives.
In Portugal, in education, evaluations punish schools that do not present themselves with a very high level of passes. A few years ago, Portugal was the country in Western Europe where the fewest people had completed secondary education. This felt like a shame. State assessments put pressure on whether or not European standards are achieved, even though many diplomas are lies. And something else happens: obliged by law to evaluate themselves, universities invent very complicated systems, labyrinthine computer platforms, in which professors communicate what they have done, and in the end we almost all leave with grades of “excellent” and “very good”.
Faced with these baroque farces or the political pressure that is reflected in many evaluations, the conscience of each person is worth much more. I continue to believe in it, and I am guided by my conscience, respecting that of others. Poor me if I was fanatically guided by the scales that are established for my work: I would transform into a sad puppet of government whims. A machine for producing futility. Also, when we act based on the best of our conscience, the nebula of endless surveillance that surrounds us ends up proving us right.
I think that the powers that be today consider that within us there is only a stone of selfishness, a climbing plant of interests that grows on the wall of every biography, and that it is necessary to control that rock or that hedge through constant vigilance. What a sad view of the human being. Basically, it’s like we’re circus animals who have to be threatened with a whip so they jump through hoops of fire.
It is obvious that the act of evaluating can be positive, and I evaluate my students, and they evaluate me, but these evaluations represent, in reality, a dialogue of consciences. I tell the student what I think of his work, and he also comments on his journey, the evolution of the subject, which leads to an appreciation of my work. This has nothing to do with the ice charts we are put in today, handcuffing our lives.
My advice to the reader, who may be evaluating someone or being evaluated by someone else, is to trust their conscience. This is not an archaism, but a human eternity. Consciousness by conscience, we will succeed in bringing down the dictatorship of evaluation that is being built and which, in the end, is nothing more than the holy inquisition that has invented planetary money so that we all dance to the sound of its timpani.
