Ocho

Although most tango women can dance the ocho, many underestimate its significance and fail to dedicate sufficient time to mastering it. Yet, if there is one step that can dramatically elevate a woman’s tango, it is the ocho. This is because ocho integrates nearly all the fundamental techniques essential to a woman’s dance: embrace, posture, connection, torso communication, pivot, dissociation, the gear effect, cadencia, balance control, and the ability to promptly return to the home position after each turn. A woman who executes the ocho well will excel at other movements; conversely, one with a clumsy ocho will struggle with other steps also.

In addition to being foundational, the ocho is also the most frequently used step in the female tango repertoire. It beautifully showcases a woman’s femininity through qualities such as softness, gentleness, suppleness, lightness, grace, and elegance. A woman’s tango can only truly captivate when she is able to perform the ocho with finesse. While some may argue that the molinete is another quintessential female step, it is essentially a sequence of forward and backward ochos.

The term ocho comes from the Spanish word for “eight.” In this figure, the woman traces an S-shape on the floor with one leg, then mirrors the same movement with the other, forming overlapping curves in opposite directions that visually resemble the number 8. The movement begins with the woman rotating her hips and stepping to one side of her partner, followed by a pivot, another rotation of the hips, and a step in the opposite direction.

To dance the ocho beautifully, a woman must maintain excellent connection, balance, flexibility, grace, and elegance. Those who use an open embrace often mistakenly turn their entire body rather than isolating the rotation in the hips, breaking the connection. The correct technique is to keep the torso connected to the partner while swiveling the hips before stepping, as demonstrated in the video below (6:10–10:00). This technique preserves the physical intimacy that defines tango.

Many teachers emphasize dissociation—hip rotation—as the key to a proper ocho. However, they often overlook another essential element: cadencia, or the swing of the body. Combining dissociation with cadencia not only adds elegance to the ocho but also creates a delightful swaying motion that enhances the movement's pleasure. Achieving this swing requires moderating the dance tempo. Many students dance too hastily, leaving no time for their body to sway gracefully. The man should allow the woman time to prepare and execute each swing, while the woman should perform it with poise and elegance, as demonstrated by the couple in the video below.

The ocho can be danced in a variety of ways. It is the most expressive and versatile of tango steps, allowing a woman to fully embody and display her feminine, gentle, soft, pliable, graceful, and creative beauty. Here are some examples.

Mastering these variations enables a woman to bring creativity and nuance to her dance. However, true artistry lies not in showcasing skills. Tango women should practice these variations until they have fully internalized the movements. This internalization allows them to focus on their partner rather than the steps. A current bad trend is to overuse variations in a single dance. Women should resist the temptation to overwhelm themselves with flashy alternatives and instead prioritize the classic style of the ocho, reserving variations as occasional flourishes.

The ocho can also be deeply seductive due to the gear effect—the rolling motion of the woman’s chest against the man’s torso as she swiveling her hips. The woman must avoid focusing only on her footwork. Instead, she should focus on making her partner feel good and fostering deep, meaningful communication with him as she dances ocho. This is achievable only when she has internalized the movement (see The Four Stages of the Tango Journey).

America Is in Big Trouble

Wealth is created by the real economy—sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, mining, energy, and construction. In contrast, trade, professional services, and financial sectors merely support the real economy, extracting value in exchange for their services rather than generating wealth independently (see Mammonism).

Over the past few decades, the United States has undergone severe deindustrialization. Aside from a few remaining high-tech and military industries, most manufacturing has relocated to countries with lower production costs. Today, the U.S. economy is dominated by financial capitalism, relying heavily on monetary maneuvers to extract global wealth, even as its real productivity has long been unable to sustain its hegemony. America's perceived economic strength now rests more on financial engineering than on genuine economic output. Over the past 20 years, while the real economy has grown by only 1.5 times, the annual issuance of U.S. dollars has increased fivefold, national debt has surged sevenfold—exceeding $34 trillion—and private lending has ballooned to another $30 trillion. Much of this money flows abroad through the purchase of foreign goods, international loans, U.S. bond sales, and debt repayments, driven by continued global demand for the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. It is estimated that more than $100 trillion in U.S. dollars circulates outside the United States.

This excessive money printing has fueled global inflation, doubling food prices, raising oil prices by 4.5 times, and tripling the price of iron ore. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency enables the United States to manipulate the global economy through its monetary policies. Monetary easing (lowering interest rates and increasing dollar supply) stimulates borrowing and spending, while monetary tightening (raising rates and restricting supply) strengthens the dollar, prompting capital to flow back into the U.S. and contracting other economies. Through this cyclical process, American financial elites are able to periodically acquire foreign assets and stocks at bargain prices. These monetary policies are reinforced by geopolitical strategies—fostering regional conflicts, inciting social unrest, and supporting "color revolutions" under the pretense of promoting human rights—to destabilize investment climates elsewhere. In this way, the U.S. extracts wealth from other nations while profiting from arms sales and conflicts. However, the primary beneficiaries are not ordinary Americans, but elite special interests.

From the perspective of developing nations, the global economic order—established and maintained by U.S. elites—is profoundly unfair and immoral. To protect this system, the United States has historically sought to suppress rising economic competitors, from the U.K., Germany, Japan, and the USSR in the past, to Russia, Europe, and China today. By instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the U.S. seeks to weaken Russia while simultaneously engineering a security crisis in Europe. Severing Europe's access to cheap Russian energy has allowed American energy to dominate European markets at much higher costs, fueling inflation, driving up production costs, damaging European industries, and accelerating capital outflows. This has further eroded Europe's strategic autonomy, binding it more tightly to American interests against the emerging East. Similarly, in the Indo-Pacific, the United States is forging alliances—with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Australia, and NATO's expansion—aimed at containing China.

The American oligarchy’s commitment to maintaining global dominance directly conflicts with the aspirations of other nations, which seek a cooperative, equitable international environment conducive to mutual growth. Yet the U.S.'s pursuit of unilateral hegemony, its extraterritorial reach, and its prioritization of self-interest have provoked growing resistance around the world.

At home, soaring debt, inflation, and a hollowed-out economy have left U.S. policymakers increasingly anxious. Instead of addressing deep-seated structural and institutional weaknesses, they double down on aggressive tactics to externalize their crises: raising the debt ceiling repeatedly, coercing other nations into buying U.S. treasuries with little intention of repayment, flexing military power, provoking regional conflicts, launching trade and financial wars, imposing unilateral sanctions, freezing and confiscating foreign assets, and exercising long-arm jurisdiction. They also weaponize the U.S. dollar and the SWIFT financial system, sabotage foreign infrastructure, and engage in economic embargoes, decoupling strategies, and geopolitical isolation. While intended to suppress rival economies, these strategies simultaneously harm the U.S. itself, eroding its global reputation, undermining confidence in the dollar, and accelerating de-dollarization and global sell-offs of U.S. treasuries—ultimately hastening the decline of American economic dominance.

Meanwhile, rampant inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively, triggering a wave of bank failures, a global economic downturn, and widespread financial market turmoil, particularly in heavily indebted countries.

For its own self-interest, the United States has become a major source of global instability. Yet the ruling elite remains unwilling to change course, clinging to the belief that they can perpetuate American dominance through financial manipulation and military interventions. Some imagine they can continue harvesting the wealth of other nations indefinitely through unchecked money printing. Others seem willing to risk a world war to preserve their primacy.

On the surface, America’s crisis stems from over-financialization, but at a deeper level, it is rooted in the toxic ideologies embraced by its plutocrats—capitalism taken to extremes, social Darwinism, Machiavellianism, the law of the jungle, and a zero-sum-game mentality (see Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds). They fail to recognize that hegemony built on endless debt, rather than real economic strength, is fundamentally unsustainable.

I believe that most tango dancers do not share the ideologies of America’s oligarchs. Tango, in its spirit, opposes such predatory mentalities. Nonetheless, we must remain vigilant about the insidious influence these ideologies may have on our lives—and on tango itself.

The world that most nations seek is not one of dominance, but of democracy: a system where every country has an equal opportunity to develop and improve their people’s lives through cooperation and mutual benefit. If U.S. policymakers truly believe in democracy, they must abandon their selfish, coercive, hegemonic strategies. The American people deserve leaders of greater moral integrity. Otherwise, America will inevitably face the consequences of its own actions (see The Vicious Circle of Regime Change).

P.S.
The following video provides an in-depth explanation of the American monetary system—from the Bretton Woods Agreement and the decoupling of the U.S. dollar from gold, to its peg to oil, the rise of consumer capitalism, vendor financing, the outsourcing of manufacturing, job losses, trade deficits, growing inequality, military expansion, perpetual warfare, uncontrolled money printing, escalating debt, and the resulting dollar devaluation and inflation crisis. The speaker attributes these issues to the U.S. dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency and predicts that the system will ultimately collapse when a new currency regime emerges. The key question remains: will America's elite special interests allow change before their empire crumbles?

Darwinism and Confucianism

English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in Western intellectual history. His groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species (1859), fundamentally reshaped the way the West understands the natural world.

Darwin's theory is based on the idea of natural selection. Organisms with advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This is largely due to the fact that variations occur within all populations of organisms. Throughout the lives of the individuals their genomes interact with their environments to cause random mutations arise in the genome, which can be passed on to offspring. If a particular trait enhances survival and reproductive success, it becomes more prevalent over generations, driving the evolution of species.

Although most scientists now accept evolution as descent with modification, not all concur with Darwin's assertion that natural selection is the primary—though not exclusive—mechanism behind it. Some advanced competing theories that assigned a more limited role to natural selection. Critics argued that Darwin overemphasized the "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" among individuals, while underestimating the role of interdependence, cooperation, and ecological balance—both within and among species—in ensuring survival and evolutionary success. (See Pluralism vs. Monism.)

Darwin’s theory revolutionized biology and our understanding of life itself, but it also produced adverse impacts. Concepts such as "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" were misapplied to human societies, giving rise to ideologies like social Darwinism, individualism, exceptionalism, racism, "law of the jungle" thinking, zero-sum competition, and unipolar hegemony. These distortions eroded human solidarity, social harmony, and prospects for peace. The harm caused by these ideologies should not be underestimated: Western civilization, particularly in the post-Darwin era, has been marked by militarism, conquest, colonization, genocide, exploitation, and plundering—with Darwin’s fellow countrymen playing a central role. These ideologies also fueled Western capitalism that led to brutal competitions, massive inequality, resource depletion, ecological destruction, and environmental degradation. (See Democracy vs. Plutocracy.)

By contrast, Darwinism has had less ideological influence in the East, where Confucianism has long shaped cultural and philosophical foundations. Confucian thought emphasizes harmony between humanity and nature, the shared destiny of humankind, and the ideal of peaceful coexistence. It offers a holistic worldview that sees the universe as an interconnected whole rather than a battlefield of competing interests. While acknowledging contradictions and tensions, Confucianism seeks to resolve them through balance, mutual dependence, and the integration of diverse elements—discouraging antagonism and the elimination of adversaries.

Where Darwinism stresses the instinct for individual survival, Confucianism elevates the moral and intellectual potential of human beings above primal impulses. Confucius articulated this ethical vision through five core virtues: 仁 (ren—benevolence, compassion, and love), 義 (yi—righteousness, justice, and equity), 禮 (li—propriety, morality, and law), 智 (zhi—wisdom, knowledge, and reason), and 信 (xin—trust, integrity, and good faith). Unlike the animal world, where the strong prey upon the weak, Confucianism holds that human civilization must transcend the "law of the jungle." The flourishing of society depends on moral cultivation, social cooperation, and the collective pursuit of the common good. (See Understanding China: Geography, Confucianism, and Chinese-Style Modernization).

While it is still too early to render a definitive judgment on the relative merits of Eastern versus Western philosophies, current global trends suggest that values rooted in civilization, collectivism, cooperation, and shared prosperity may ultimately serve humanity better than those driven by barbarism, individualism, selfishness, and ruthless competition. The rise of the East and the relative decline of the West point to the enduring relevance of Confucian values. This philosophical divergence also echoes in cultural expressions such as tango. (See Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds.)