Cape Verde: Party Loyalty Before the Country
In Cape Verde, political debate has too often been conditioned by the logic of belonging. Party affiliation, which ideally should reflect a civic and rational choice, has become an identity marker that shapes how reality is perceived. Psychologists describe this phenomenon as identity-protective cognition - the human tendency to filter information in order to protect one’s connection to the group (Kahan, 2017).
In this context, political commitment ceases to be a matter of ideas and becomes instead a matter of loyalty.
When a leader fails — which is not rare — the reaction is to justify, relativize, or remain silent. This behaviour reveals what could be called moral cognitive dissonance, that is, the tension between recognising an error and accepting it to avoid the discomfort of contradiction. The militant, faced with failure, resolves that dissonance through rationalisation — and little by little, error ceases to be the exception and becomes the rule.
The Echo of Loyalties
This dynamic is particularly visible on social media.
In official or personal posts by high dignitaries of the country, one finds long chains of comments that applaud but rarely question. They are automatic praises, verbal bows, formulas of approval that function as conditioned reflexes: applause becomes more important than content.
What is omitted, problematic, or even trivial is rarely mentioned.
Thus, the digital public space, which could be a place of enlightened debate, turns into an echo chamber of loyalties, where disagreement is perceived as an affront.
Unfortunately, algorithms reinforce this pattern: by showing only what confirms the user’s beliefs, they create a closed cognitive space where doubt is seen as weakness.
The Cape Verdean militant, like digital activists elsewhere, lives inside a bubble that reflects back the echo of his own certainties.
Disagreement, instead of being viewed as a natural component of democratic life, becomes an identity threat.
From Loyalty to Fanaticism
At the opposite extreme, there are also those who, in the name of freedom of expression, respond to rigidity with aggression. Insult replaces argument; emotion supplants reasoning. It is the reign of the argumentum ad hominem — attacking the person rather than what is said.
This is an understandable but impoverishing mechanism: debate ceases to be a confrontation of ideas and becomes a stage for unprocessed emotions.
Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), observed that faced with the uncertainty of freedom, many seek refuge in submission or destructiveness.
Verbal aggression, in this context, is an attempt to reaffirm the “self” by devaluing the other — the reverse side of partisan conformism. Both reveal the same difficulty: dealing with the complexity and solitude of thinking for oneself.
Language as Ideological Territory
Nothing reveals this cognitive imprisonment more clearly than the linguistic debate in Cape Verde.
Language, which should be an instrument of communication and a plural heritage, is turned into a symbolic field of power.
Instead of calmly discussing the place of Creole and Portuguese - and their possible coexistence - an orthodoxy is imposed: those who question or diverge are accused of elitism or identity betrayal. Ideology replaces argument. Debate becomes dogma.
Language ceases to be what we say and becomes what we are allowed to say.
The defence of a single “official” variant, imposed without real dialogue, is presented as an act of emancipation but contains, paradoxically, an authoritarian impulse.
What is being fixed is not merely a grammar, but a truth — and, by extension, a way of thinking.
This rigidity also mirrors the temptation to rewrite history: to erase what disturbs, exalt what suits, and mould the past to serve the dominant narrative.
History turns into myth; memory into propaganda. And when language and history begin to serve ideology, the freedom to think becomes suspect.
The Danger of Not Thinking
Hannah Arendt reminded us that “thinking is dangerous, but not thinking is more dangerous still” (The Life of the Mind, 1978). When thought becomes captive to group loyalty or dissolves into hostility, the public space is impoverished. Thus Karl Popper warned that the open society can only survive if its citizens are willing to question their own certainties (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945).
Today, perhaps the challenge of Cape Verde - and not only of Cape Verde - is precisely this: to rediscover the balance between belonging and critical thought, between conviction and listening.
Ideologies, once tools of analysis, have become mental prisons. They offer ready-made certainties that, by sparing us the effort of thinking, prevent real transformation. But a nation that renounces doubt also renounces its future.
To think with decency and courage remains the most patriotic act a society can cultivate.
For true love of country is not measured by fidelity to a party, but by fidelity to the truth.
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