Football (soccer) remains one of the last true sanctuaries of meritocracy.

There, no narrative can save you. It does not matter whether the best team wins or loses, because if you are poor… you do not play. If you are unfit for purpose… you watch from the sidelines.

No solemnity can conceal a mistake, no title can excuse mediocrity. The body speaks. And it speaks plainly.

The same applies to other sports, regardless of the size or shape of the ball, but football is the king.

What happens in political power is altogether different. And not only there.

Society accepts authorities even when merit is absent, because power—once accumulated—ceases to be a tool and becomes an object of worship. It no longer matters whether actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Power itself becomes unquestionable.

Family. Work. Government.

The setting is irrelevant: it is always easier to adapt to harmful, unjust, or downright deranged rules than to pause and challenge them.

I am still struck— by that peculiar solemnity imposed in certain circles with a single purpose: to invalidate any question or to disguise the absence of merit.

That shameful excess of reverence. Almost choreographed. Particularly visible in some academic hierarchies and in certain religious groups that no longer venerate ideas, but themselves. A reverence bordering on the militarised.

Sixty-six years ago, in his brief and razor-sharp text “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges quoted Spinoza: “Everything desires to persist in its own being; the stone eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger, a tiger.”

Thus, the tepid become superficial. The self-interested, accommodating. And the cowardly, devoid of dignity.

That perfect cocktail creates the ideal climate for despots, ignoramuses, and manipulators to ascend to the status of authority.

My analogy today crosses cultures. Japan and Spain.

There is a condescension towards the other that wounds. It wounds as much as those Japanese or Spanish series in which a voice-over explains the plot as though the viewer were incapable of understanding it unaided.

That same condescension seeps into everyday life. When that character appears—black suit, round bowler hat— an anime-born stereotype demanding our attention and instructing us what to think and when to applaud.

But not all of us require a voice-over. Some of us still trust our ability to understand, to doubt, and—above all— not to adapt docilely to that which does not deserve respect.

And that is precisely what this manual is about.

You have just listened to the first episode of the third season of The Lucid Misfits Handbook by Pablo Mera— Pablo E. M. G. to the English-speaking world, and simply “Trompo” to those of us who knew him long before the name travelled.

Today, he introduces one of his newest analogies— almost delirious at first glance, yet ultimately revealing itself not to be so.

His podcasts travel the world and are available on all major platforms.

The author offers more than 13,000 posts drawn from his personal history on his blog, freely accessible at http://pablomera.blogspot.com

And he invites listeners to write to him at tromp@hotmail.com.]