When we look at the world, it's evident that there's a group of countries ahead of Latin America. We perceive this daily when we see the achievements of their societies, when we visit them and observe how their nationals live. Essentially, everything seems easier for the people who inhabit them; they appear to have a more comfortable and peaceful life, unfolding within an environment where everything simply works better. We frequently hear about development; however, many don't know what it means, nor are we clear on how it's achieved. In this regard, a set of theories, none of them proven, have filled us with myths that attempt to explain the reasons why such marked differences in development exist between countries.
To understand development, it's enough to think about the set of conditions whose existence would facilitate the possibility of realizing our expectations and those of everyone around us; that is, a series of aspects of our reality and our environment that would offer the possibility of us living happily and in harmony.
The truth is that our explanations regarding the reasons why some countries have managed to develop and others have not are centered on blaming others for such a condition. In a somewhat adolescent manner, the prevailing ideas attempt to absolve us of the responsibility for our backwardness and underdevelopment.
In any case, developed countries are ahead of us mainly due to the capacity their societies have to add much more value than ours. The willingness to work together and build sophisticated things with which they are capable of modifying the world and its reality is what has allowed them to secure the conditions for their nationals to live in an environment of undeniable well-being.
It's worth noting that adding value implies the execution of systematic collaborative processes aimed at consolidating the contributions of a multitude of individuals around results capable of providing satisfaction and well-being to our compatriots and the rest of the world.
The magnitude of the differences is evident. While developed countries have jointly built the technology to safely transport people into outer space, Latin Americans are not capable of providing themselves with basic transportation infrastructure. Something similar occurs with health, education, justice, and the other essential dimensions of well-being.
Of course, there are several aspects that have made it possible for some to build more value than others. The first and most fundamental is culture. What can be seen in developed countries is a marked obsession, cultivated from an early age in each individual of their societies, to achieve, to materialize, to build, to solve, and above all, to advance. In contrast, the culture of Latin America is focused on demanding that others build the value we need, on trying to adapt the world to our own limitations, on destroying and questioning human achievements.
The second, which is also essential, is knowledge. The more sophisticated it is, the greater the real capacity to build value will be. Aerospace travel, for example, requires a very significant number of people with an undeniable command of physics, mathematics, engineering, computer science, and astrophysics, to mention some of the areas of knowledge involved. The more generalized such a level of knowledge is within a society, in its different economic sectors, the greater the possibilities of jointly solving more complex problems and satisfying more difficult needs will be. Consequently, what we can see is that developed countries take the generation and, above all, the generalization of deep and rigorous knowledge very seriously, while Latin American countries question it, despise it, and above all, underestimate it. Furthermore, it is poorly disseminated among its population, not to mention that it focuses on areas such as the social sciences, with a lower capacity to generate joint processes of value creation.
Indeed, countries with different cultures and disparate levels of knowledge tend to make very different decisions that lead them down divergent paths. For example, Norway and Venezuela at some point in their history made very different decisions regarding how to manage oil resources and the income generated by their production and export. Of course, currently, they are countries with diametrically opposed levels of development.
What is clear is that developed countries and Latin America currently have very different capacities to understand the world and, above all, to face their most structural problems. Therefore, if we want to evolve in the sense of building the conditions that will ensure our well-being and facilitate the realization of our happiness, we need to drastically increase our capacity to build value by modifying our culture, focusing it on achievement and advancement, improving our knowledge, making it deeper, more sophisticated, and more widespread, centering it on areas of high value aggregation, and above all, we have to start making different decisions that will lead us surely down the path of development.
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