Ocho

Although all tango women can dance ocho, many fail to fully grasp its importance and dedicate sufficient time to mastering it. However, if there is one step that can significantly elevate a woman's tango, it is ocho. This is because ocho encompasses all the fundamental techniques essential to a woman's dance, including embrace, posture, connection, torso communication, pivot, dissociation, gear effect, cadencia, balance control, and the ability to return to the home position promptly after each turn. A woman who executes ocho well will excel at other movements, whereas a woman with a clumsy ocho will struggle with other steps also. Furthermore, ocho is the most frequently used step in the female repertoire of tango. It beautifully expresses a woman's femininity through qualities such as softness, gentleness, suppleness, lightness, grace, and elegance. A woman's tango can truly captivate only when she can perform ocho perfectly. While some may argue that molinete is another quintessential female step, it is simply a sequence of forward and backward ochos.

The term "ocho" originates from the Spanish word for "eight." In this figure, the woman traces the shape of an "S" on the floor with one leg, then repeats the same movement with the other leg. The two S shapes overlap in opposite directions, creating the visual effect of the number 8. To execute ocho, the woman begins by rotating her hips and stepping to one side of her partner. She then pivots, rotates her hips again, and steps in the opposite direction.

Executing ocho with excellent connection, balance, flexibility, grace, and elegance is crucial. Women who use an open dance hold often turn their entire body instead of isolating the rotation in their hips, thus breaking the embrace. The correct technique is to keep the torso connected to the partner while swiveling the hips before stepping forward, as shown in the video below (6:10-10:00). This allows you to maintain physical interaction with your partner while executing ocho, ensuring the connection and intimacy that tango represents.

Most tango teachers emphasize dissociation—i.e., the rotation of the hips—when teaching ocho, but they often neglect another critical technique: cadencia, or the swing of the body. Combining dissociation with cadencia not only adds elegance to 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 sufficient time to execute the swing, while the woman should perform it with poise and elegance, as demonstrated by the couple in the video below.

Ocho can be danced in a variety of ways. It is the most colorful of all tango steps that can fully display a woman's feminine, gentle, soft, pliable, graceful, and creative beauty.Here are some examples.

Mastering these variations enables a woman to add creativity to her dance. 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 ocho, using variations only as occasional embellishments.

Ocho can be a very seductive move because of the gear effect, which refers to the woman's chest rolling on the man's torso. The woman must avoid focusing only on her own performance. Instead, she should focus on making him 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. They do not generate wealth independently (see Mammonism).

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

Such 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 U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency allows America to manipulate the global economy through monetary policies. By employing monetary easing (reducing interest rates and increasing the dollar supply), the U.S. stimulates borrowing. Conversely, monetary tightening (raising interest rates and restricting dollar supply) causes the dollar to appreciate, prompting capital to return to the U.S. while contracting other economies. This cyclical process enables American financial elites to periodically acquire foreign assets and stocks at discounted prices. Monetary policies are often reinforced by geopolitical strategies such as fostering regional tensions, inciting social unrest, and supporting color revolutions under the guise of human rights promotions to undermine the investment climate in other countries. These tactics allow the U.S. to reap wealth from other nations while profiting from arms sales and conflicts. However, the primary beneficiaries are not the American people but the country’s elite special interests.

From the perspective of developing nations, the current global economic order—established and maintained by U.S. special interests—is both unfair and immoral. To sustain this system, the U.S. has historically sought to suppress rising economic competitors, from the U.K., Germany, and the USSR in the past, to Russia, Europe, and China today. By instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the U.S. aims to weaken Russia while creating a security crisis in Europe. Cutting off cheap Russian energy to the continent has allowed the U.S. to dominate the European market with expensive American energy, triggering severe inflation, raising production costs, damaging European industries, and accelerating capital outflows. This has further eroded Europe’s strategic autonomy, tethering it to American interests in opposition to the rising East. Similarly, in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. is leveraging alliances with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Australia, and NATO’s expansion to contain China.

The American oligarchy’s commitment to maintaining global dominance conflicts with the aspirations of other nations to develop their own economies. Most countries seek a cooperative and equitable international environment conducive to mutual growth. However, the U.S.’s pursuit of unilateral hegemony, its extraterritorial jurisdiction, and its prioritization of self-interest have led to mounting resistance worldwide.

Faced with soaring debt, inflation, and financial crises that a hollowed-out economy must face, U.S. policymakers exhibit growing anxiety. Yet instead of addressing deep-seated structural and institutional weaknesses, they resort to high-handed tactics to externalize their crises. These include continually raising the debt ceiling, coercing other nations into purchasing U.S. treasuries without intent to repay, flexing military muscle, provoking regional conflicts, launching trade and financial wars, imposing unilateral sanctions, freezing and confiscating foreign overseas assets, and exercising long-arm jurisdiction. Additionally, they weaponize the U.S. dollar and the SWIFT system, sabotage foreign infrastructure, and engage in economic embargoes, decoupling strategies, and geopolitical isolation. While designed to suppress rival economies, these tactics also harm the U.S. economy, erode America’s global reputation, weaken the dollar’s credibility, and accelerate global sell-off of U.S. treasuries and de-dollarization, which will ultimately lead to the erosion of U.S. economic dominance.

Compounding these challenges, rampant inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates aggressively, triggering the current wave of bank failures and a global economic downturn, causing turmoil in the financial markets of many countries, especially heavily indebted countries.

For its own self-interest, the United States has become a source of global instability. Its ruling elite remains unwilling to change course, convinced they can sustain their dominance indefinitely through financial manipulation and military intervention. Some think they can harvest others nations' wealth forever just by keeping the money printing presses running. Others are willing to start another world war to maintain their primacy. On the surface, America’s crisis stems from over-financialization, but the deeper issue lies in the ideology embraced by its plutocrats—capitalism, Darwinism, Machiavellianism, the law of the jungle, and the zero-sum game mentality (see Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds). They fail to acknowledge that hegemony built on mounting debt rather than real economic strength is unsustainable. Most tango dancers do not embrace the ideologies of the American oligarchs, I believe, as these ideologies contradict the spirit of tango, but we cannot but be wary of the negative influence of these ideologies on our life and tango.

The world most nations seek is one based on democratic principles, where all countries have 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, and shortsighted strategies. The American people deserve leaders with greater moral integrity. Otherwise, America will inevitably face the consequences of its behaviors (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, consumer capitalism, vendor financing, outsourcing of manufacturing, job losses, trade deficits, rising inequality, military expansion, perpetual warfare, uncontrolled money printing, increasing debt, and ultimately, the dollar’s devaluation and inflation crisis. The speaker attributes this doomed system to dollar as the world reserve currency and suggests that these will all end when a new currency regime emerges. The key question is: will the U.S.'s elite special interests allow that to happen before their empire collapses?

Darwinism and Confucianism

English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the Western Hemisphere. His book, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, revolutionized Western thought.

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 variation exists 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 their offspring. Because individuals with certain variants of the trait tend to survive and reproduce more than individuals with other less successful variants, the population evolves.

While most scientists came to accept evolution as descent with modification, not all agreed with Darwin's assertion that natural selection is the primary, but not exclusive, means of modification. Some favored competing explanations that assigned a lesser role to natural selection. One critique is that Darwin placed too much emphasis on the "struggle for existence" and "the survival of the fittest" among individuals, and did not give sufficient consideration to the role of coexistence, unity, interdependence and cooperation within a species, and the importance of ecological balance between species in the evolution of species. (See Pluralism vs. Monism.)

While Darwin's theory has given us a new conception of the world of life and revolutionized the whole study of nature, it also had adverse impacts. One of the negative consequences was the misguided use of the concepts of "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" among individuals to human societies. This has resulted in ideologies such as social Darwinism, individualism, exceptionalism, racism, law of the jungle theory, zero-sum competition, and unipolar hegemony, etc., that pose a threat to human solidarity, social harmony, and world peace. The harms these ideologies have done to mankind should not be underestimated, as Western civilization ever since Darwin was built on power, warfare, conquest, colonization, genocide, exploitation, and looting of other peoples, with Darwin's fellow countrymen taking a prominent role. These ideologies have also fuelled Western capitalism that led to brutal competitions, severe inequality, depletion of natural resources, destruction of ecological balance, and damage to the environment. (See Democracy vs. Plutocracy.)

Fortunately, Darwinism does not have such a big influence in the East, where Confucianism emphasizes the unity of man and nature, the shared destiny of mankind, and the harmonious coexistence between people. Confucianism embraces a holistic view, seeing the universe as an integrated whole rather than as disparate entities. It acknowledges that, despite contradictions, harmony prevails, with opposing elements being interrelated, interdependent, and complementary. This worldview seeks the balance of opposites, the integration of diversity, and the harmony of differences, eschewing conflict escalation and adversary elimination.

While Darwinism emphasizes the survival instincts of individual organisms, Confucianism highlights the superiority of humanity over animal instincts. This humanity was summarized by Confucius as 仁 (benevolence, compassion, and love), 義 (righteousness, justice, and equity), 禮 (morality, propriety, and law), 智 (wisdom, knowledge, and reason), and 信 (integrity, good faith, and trustiness). Human society cannot adhere to the law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak, as seen in the animal world. Instead, as an intelligent and humane species, individuals must undergo enlightenment and moral cultivation to overcome their self-serving limitations and work together as a unified collective for their shared destiny and common good (see Understanding China: Geography, Confucianism, and Chinese-Style Modernization).

Although it may be too early to draw conclusions about the strengths of Eastern versus Western philosophies, the rise of the East and the decline of the West in our times seems to suggest that, ultimately, civilized values, collectivism, cooperation, and sharing may be more beneficial to human species than barbarism, individualism, selfishness, and brutal competition. This perspective is supported by tango. (See Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds.)