Lluís Foix 23/04/2021
Image: Ítaca
One of the consequences of societies broken by irreconcilable ideas and policies is the absolute disregard of the other, who is not only an adversary, but an enemy to be struck down. Each country has its own particular way of displaying its internal divisions and the impossibility of recollecting wounds to resume a respectful life with those who think differently.
It is difficult for us to accept the reality of the facts, which are what should help us to substantiate our opinions. Isaiah Berlin argued that the curse of the twentieth century had been that its two main utopias – Hitler’s and Stalin’s – rejected the very idea of the indivisibility of the human species. A true communist believer did not even try to persuade a bourgeois or aristocrat of the truth of communist principles because they were class enemies who had to be reeducated or disposed of. Similarly, the Nazis did not deign to reason with Jews, Gypsies, or other racial enemies who had to be exterminated like plagues.
The denial of respect for the different makes civic coexistence impossible
The romantic idea of perfect systems runs through history causing death and misfortune. The denial that all humans are the same everywhere led to the fatal conclusion that those who did not belong to the same ethnic group or did not share the same ideas did not deserve to exist.
The Nazi death camps or the Soviet gulags were the application of this thought that does not admit personal or social limitations. Democracies endure, reform themselves and endure internal shocks, because the most they aspire to is to overcome the current crisis while waiting for the next one to arrive, and so on ad infinitum.
I am not seduced by politicians who never apologize or do not admit that what everything is about is just to reconstruct the broken parts of human fragility, starting with that of each one. Electoral debates are convincing techniques in which not only disagreement with the ideas of the other appears, but also a deep contempt for the people who hold them.
Politics in times torn by the pandemic and by the many crises that have resulted cannot become a useless, demagogic and hostile game between those who think differently in order to reach or remain in power. The priority, in my opinion, is today to vaccinate all of humanity and reduce the inequalities that have occurred in a long period of massive wealth creation. If those who have more are less and less and those who do not have are more and more, riots will be inevitable.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/opinion/20210423/7044316/peligro-utopias.html
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