The most profound idea that I learned from that entire process was concientización. There isn’t an exact equivalent in English. “Awareness”, “critical consciousness”, or “consciousness raising” get close but don’t really capture the revolutionary potential of the word. Concientización is the process of becoming aware of how the world actually works — the structures, unseen forces, and power relations. It’s about learning to see the habits and patterns that shape our thinking and ultimately finding ways to break free from mental colonization. The verb form is concientizarse which is a reflexive verb (that is, “a verb where the subject performing the action is also the object receiving the action”). In this case, one is waking oneself up from slumber to become conscious of the world as it really is.

Concientización was the basis for nearly all of the transformative social movements in Latin America at the time and those that followed including the Zapatista Movement in Mexico (1994-present), the Bolivian Indigenous Movement (2000s-present), and the growth of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil.….

Bougieness is the opposite of concientización. Bougieness is about learning to become well-adjusted to a society that is pathologically insane. In trying to fit in with the crowd, the bougiecrat abandons the search for truth in return for the meager table scraps that come from serving the ruling class.

I now realize that my erstwhile Democratic colleagues were never serious about challenging corporate power and they trusted the state beyond all reason. They have always “preferred the illusion of power and control instead of true freedom” (to borrow a phrase from Susan Faludi). This was merely annoying until Democrats made an unholy alliance with Big Pharma and then it became an existential threat to humanity.