From the book by Armando Vargas Araya, La Vía Costarricense, published by EUNED in 2005, this is a wonderfully inspiring text as it initiates a broad, open and participatory process.
It is a dynamic conceptual tool to develop specific and useful political thinking; to identify, add and enhance elements of our unique and irreplaceable common personality; to unleash the productive powers, awaken the creative forces, spur the energies of youth, and steer the national destiny upward and forward, higher and further. It is the epitome of autonomous and autochthonous strengths and values, of method and content to overcome the past, overcome stagnation and build the future.
Its values are, first and foremost, the luminous trilogy of freedom, justice and peace. Person-centered development, as an elevation from a less human plane to a more human condition. Efficient and growing production, exogenous and endogenous, that generates quality employment. Abundance and redistribution of wealth through education, health, housing and infrastructure.
The virtues that sustain the national character are industriousness, moderation and self-confidence. In addition, charity, tolerance and hope. Solidarity that frees from need and fear. Frugality that postpones the superfluous and privileges the austere. It is a civic humanism. [Civic humanism is the modern enunciation of moral, social and political philosophy that places the person and his or her capacities at the center of all attention; an expression coined by the German historian Hans Baron (1900-1988), it denotes the type of politically committed humanism that arose in Florence between 1390 and 1402; today, it is a source of inspiration in the revival of classical republicanism, especially in the debate on communitarianism as a philosophy favorable to civil society. See, Hans Baron, En busca del humanismo cívico florentino: ensayos sobre el cambio del pensamiento medieval moderno, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993; James Hankins (Editor), Renaissance Civic Humanism: reappraisals and reflections, Cambridge University Press, 2000].
It is an eclectic method, alien to extreme solutions, which reconciles doctrines from different systems. Pragmatic, it finds truth in efficiency and value for life. Dialectical because of its capacity for synthesis. Open because it examines everything and retains the good. Method that allows to think with its own head and to build national consensus.
Its content is republican and democratic, reformist and progressive. Equidistant from excessive statism and extreme capitalism, it advocates a genuine mixed economy regime. He proposes a development that does not take place at the expense of the majority, that the profit motive does not overwhelm the ethics of liberal democracy. [Only foolishness can induce us to build a golden house, but surrounded by desert or degradation”, Benedict XVI, Message for the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2009].
The Costa Rican Way is the workmanship not of a leader, a party, an ideology or a historical stage but quintessence of the rhythms, forms and times of Costa Ricanness.[Each society hasits own time and history; each is situated in a theory of history,” writes Jacques Attali in Histories of Time, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001, and adds: “To invoke the past and include in a memory the data that point to it, the time of the gods and the heroes of the people, confers a meaning to societies”]. Each civilization is an order, a rhythm, a vision of time, the gold of experience that amasses the battle of the centuries.
