Values Sovereignty: Social Technologies for Its Measurement and Protection

The interview conceptualizes value sovereignty as the capacity of individuals, society, and the state to preserve the stability of their own value system, reproduce it across generations, and remain recognizable in dialogue with other cultures. Value sovereignty is broader than ideology: it concerns the foundations from which both ideology and culture emerge. Its core is intergenerational unity, understood as the ability of different generations to recognize in one another fundamental distinctions, even when the forms through which these distinctions are expressed change. Maintaining value sovereignty requires social technologies which, through the algorithmization and standardization of social activity, create conditions for the reproduction and intergenerational transmission of values while also making it possible to assess the effectiveness of public policy. In addition to traditional opinion surveys, values can now be studied through their digital traces in social media and with the help of neurotechnologies, including MRI and eye tracking. Value metrics could become a practical tool for evaluating public policy and, by measuring the overlap between value patterns across countries, for assessing the feasibility of integration projects and improving the effectiveness of international policy. Value sovereignty exists where society and the state are capable of ensuring it. For postcolonial societies, including those of Latin America and the Caribbean, this task is particularly complex: formal independence does not always mean overcoming symbolic and value dependence. Historical and cultural memory are key mechanisms for the intergenerational transmission of a value system: through memory, society transmits not only knowledge about the past but also ideas of justice, dignity, heroism, and duty. Political independence becomes stable only when society understands which values it regards as its own. At the same time, memory is also directed toward the future. Value sovereignty may be compared to a native language: it changes and borrows, yet remains one’s own as long as its inner structure is still felt.