Remarks given at the National Meeting on Citizen Diplomacy by
Óscar Arias Sánchez
Discurso que pronuncié el día de hoy en el 2015 Global Ties National Meeting/75th Anniversary
Washington, D.C.
5 February 2015
IF WE CAN ONLY SEE CLEARLY THE WORLD AT OUR FEET
My dear friends:
There is an old story about a king who decided to conduct a small experiment. He leads six blind men to different parts of an elephant’s body and asks them to determine the nature of the animal before them. One man feels the elephant’s belly and says the elephant is like a wall. One man feels the leg, and says the elephant is like a pillar. One man feels the ear, and says the elephant is like a fan – and so on. At the end, the king tells them that they are all right, because they have correctly described the part of the elephant within their reach. However, a larger truth has obviously escaped them. They have failed to understand the elephant in the room.
This little story has proved remarkably resilient. It has surfaced in the sacred texts, folklore, poetry and song of very different religions and cultures over a period of centuries. I believe the reason it has stuck with us is that it captures such an essential part of the human experience. All of us are blind, in our way. It is our natural condition. As infants, we sense only the immediate surroundings of our mother’s arms; we experience each moment with complete intensity because we cannot imagine what might come next. As the days pass, we comprehend the concept of the room, then the house, then the town, but our understanding of the world is still limited to the people and places we encounter in our daily routine. It is possible to spend an entire lifetime grasping the ear of the elephant and believing we have understood it all. In Washington, D.C., it seems appropriate to add that in the world of politics, we tend to believe that our opponents are guilty of this – but sometimes, we ourselves are doing the same thing. We and our adversaries are just standing in front of different parts of the elephant. We are both right, and we are both wrong.
There are only two guaranteed solutions to this lifelong blindness. We hear a lot about the value of age and experience in bringing perspective – but really, the accumulation of years on this planet, or years on the job, does not bring us greater wisdom on its own. In fact, age and experience can confirm prejudices and narrow our worldview, rather than expanding it, if we are not careful. No: there are only two proven ways to see more clearly. Education is one. Travel is the other. In the words of Mark Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” To put it another way, we cannot understand the world by feeling just one part of the elephant. We must actively seek out fresh perspectives that can open our eyes.
Our hosts today are in the business of helping people do just that. The Global Ties U.S. and the International Visitors Leadership Program are in the business of helping people see. Not because the United States has all the answers – although it goes without saying that your extraordinary strengths are an inspiration to your many friends around the world – but rather because the very experience of exchanging ideas in another country changes a person’s worldview forever. I have never forgotten my own time as a participant in the IVLP when I was a young Cabinet minister. While I had the very good fortune to travel as a child, and to study abroad in the United States and England as a university student, it was wonderful to visit U.S. universities in my new role as a leader within my government, and absorb ideas and strategies to improve the work I was doing back home. I did not know at the time that I would be back in the United States just a few years later, this time as a head of state. I did not know that I would visit the White House many times to meet with President Reagan, and later address a joint session of Congress, as a part of my struggle to ensure the success of the Peace Process in Central America. Certainly, my previous travels and studies in your country made me better equipped to navigate the waters of those stormy times.
