Public Priorities in Times of Scarcity

 

 

There are moments in the life of a city when the choices of its leaders stop being merely debatable and become morally indefensible. Not from a partisan perspective, but against basic standards of public responsibility, proportionality, and social priority — standards widely recognised in ethics and democratic theory. These are moments when politics abandons public service and becomes a crude exercise in distraction and calculation. The announcement by the Mayor of São Vicente of a five-day festival, in the midst of deep social and economic hardship following Storm Erin, is one such moment.

This is evident not through exaggeration, but simply by looking at the facts. São Vicente is today marked by scarcity, fragile infrastructure, families struggling to recover, and a youth adrift with no clear prospects. In this context, staging a multi-day cacophony of celebration is not just a misjudgement of priorities — it is an insult to the intelligence and dignity of the population.

Philosophically, this decision exposes a utilitarian and cynical view of power, where immediate political ends trump universal principles such as human dignity, distributive justice, and intergenerational responsibility. Instead of placing the common good and care for the vulnerable at the centre of governance, entertainment is chosen as a social anaesthetic — a kind of modern opium to make people forget empty stomachs, bare feet, and a lack of prospects, reflected in hollow, vacant gazes.

But those eyes do not convey joy or lightness. They convey pain: suppressed so as not to hurt, yet lodged deep in the soul. As Milan Kundera reminds us in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, lightness without meaning is not grace, but condemnation. Pain without weight becomes shadow: it is unspoken, yet fixed in the gaze. It is not absence of suffering, but suffering without place. Perhaps this is what we see today: not lost hope, but pain that has learned to remain silent to survive. The organized orgie of parties, appears not as a community celebration, but as an escape — a veneer of lightness imposed on a reality desperately in need of weight, meaning, and responsibility.

There is a deliberate — or conveniently cultivated — confusion between the Christmas spirit and raucous revelry. This critique is not of culture or celebration, but of its instrumentalisation in extreme deprivation. The true Christmas spirit rests on reflection, sobriety, family, and concrete solidarity. It is care, not noise; gesture, not excess; presence, not spectacle. Reducing this moment to an ordinary mockery impoverishes its meaning and trivialises fundamental values, especially when promoted by those with a heightened duty of example.

Were Socrates to witness this type of governance, he would scarcely focus on the festival itself. He would question the soul of those in power. For him, ruling was a moral exercise before it was technical, and power detached from virtue inevitably corrupts the city. Socrates warned that the worst injustice is not suffering evil, but committing it; no leader can plead ignorance when they deliberately choose to please rather than act justly. Politics that seduces instead of educating and protecting is not politics — it is demagogy, which inexorably leads to moral decay.

No less serious is the silence of the central government, here meant in a critical and metaphorical sense. By failing to intervene, despite having the means to guide priorities and uphold basic institutional standards, it helps solidify the narrative of São Vicente as an island of perpetual festivity, irresponsible lightness, and structural irrelevance. A narrative that conveniently justifies chronic underinvestment and the absence of serious public policy. Painting society as frivolous makes it easier to deny its rights and future.

With elections approaching, this initiative is far from innocent. Not as an accusation of illegality, but because political history shows how festive events are often used to manipulate emotions in vulnerable societies. The festival can be legitimately read as an attempt to exploit a large section of the population, offering distraction instead of solutions, music instead of employment policies, and fleeting euphoria instead of lasting hope. Politics reduced to spectacle.

In a context where young people without prospects seek refuge in drugs and self-destructive distractions — a phenomenon widely debated locally — this choice is particularly reckless. Instead of investing in education, training, and opportunity creation, it reinforces a culture of escape and immediacy. Public power, which should guide ethically, becomes a promoter of alienation.

In the end, one bitter truth remains: You can't pour from an empty cup. When public power offers noise instead of solutions, spectacle instead of strategy, critique is not a personal attack but a civic duty. The emptiness wrapped in lights and deafening decibels, tells us far more about the moral and political poverty of those in power than about the people of São Vicente. And that, unlike Storm Erin, is no natural disaster — it is a deliberate choice.