American strength, Chinese competitiveness, and what about us?

The last few days have been a series of reminders of the enormous weakness on which European prosperity is based, including Catalan prosperity, however precarious and improvable it may seem. Private assets that will end up in the hands of the US and its personnel. MAGA (remember: "Make America Great Again") is about making Europe (and other parts of the world) smaller—but nuclearly robust—like Israel. What can we do against this threat that is becoming more concrete every day? I see no alternative to a future of colonialism and slavery other than preparing to become stronger. Salvation, if we accept becoming colonies, leads—and it has always been this way throughout history—to various forms of slavery or servitude.

There is the threat of force, which can only be avoided by paying taxes to imperial power. But there is also the threat of competitiveness from other parts of the world. We are clear about this: now it is China; in the future it could be India. China's reality is that of a country with a very strong culture of effort and competitiveness, which has gone from being very poor to being the main challenger to US hegemony in little more than a generation. This journey has been made in about forty years—at most, forty-five. Its growth has been dazzling, and many countries are copying it. What have we done? What are we doing? Little. Where they educate children and young people in a culture of effort in all areas of life, prioritizing study and training, we despise these efforts and the culture behind them. The disdain for the culture of effort is widespread, certainly across the entire left of the political spectrum and also much of the right. The virtues of hard work and the desire to improve have been short-circuited by the culture of happiness and leisure above all else. What future awaits us in a world where our children and grandchildren learn that the important thing is to be happy, but they don't know how to defend themselves, either individually or intellectually?

Neither strength nor intelligence. It's a bad combination. This is what the European Union and each of its states and nations are becoming. The likelihood of external invasion is ever greater. Resignation in the face of blackmail takes us back to the days of payments to colonizing metropolises or blackmailing powers. We are poorly positioned to reinforce our military muscle, although we should be working on it with the best technology of our own. Where the sole responsibility lies is precisely ours, it is to recover effort. Effort everywhere, but above all in school. Recovering the skills that have been abandoned in children's education, but that everyone accepts and demands for adults: keeping the brain active and leading an active life. It is necessary to return to study in all aspects, including memorization, which is essential for practicing and consolidating memory; to physical exercise to take care of the body and its resilience; to in-depth study, to understand the complicated; to repetitive study to master routines; in prioritizing mathematics and language, which are essential for good cognitive development; in raising standards everywhere, given that without standards there is no compensation, neither in terms of remuneration, respect, self-satisfaction, nor upward social mobility. Against the wave of competitiveness in the rest of the world, starting with China but followed by many others, there is only one solution: studying hard and learning to understand everything that is more difficult. More mathematics, more language, more standards: this is the only way to offer a future to the children of the poorest and most dysfunctional families, but it is also the way to offer a future to the children of well-off families.

Against the threat of American force, the response must be the same: more determination and action, more study, more ingenuity, more knowledge, more research, more innovation, and yes, rewarding the best—a practice that seems to be legitimate only in sports!