“Words can get tired and sick, just as men or horses get tired and sick…”
(Julio Cortázar)
In the long term, an excessive trust in the effects of “words and basic community coexistence principles” produces an erosion, an important tear in the etymological purity of their purposes. This wear and tear places them in a worrying social lukewarmness by fiercely annihilating their civic legitimacy.
They have been betrayed by their premeditated misuse and their introduction in inappropriate contexts. Their excessive repetition has significantly contributed to diminishing their original meaning. On many occasions, this lack of modesty in their malicious use is associated with approaches that generate distrust and rejection in citizens.
Currently, these “elementary concepts” suffer a profound crisis of semantic identity. The weariness weighs on the reiteration. They fall into the darkness of rhetoric that alters and corrupts their deepest meaning.
This perversion is especially evident among modern media sophists (great connoisseurs of the propaganda potential of social networks), a guild that has known like no other how to adapt them to bland speeches to tell us about their self-interested interpretation on issues such as freedom, equality or social justice. Definitely, they are the ones who have contributed the most to the general weariness of these “beautiful terms”. Their unbridled contempt has managed to uglify them, drag them into a silent void, into a somber unease from within. They transit in the sleeplessness of permanent suspicion. They indoctrinate from afar without hesitation, without providing depth in the arguments, without breaking down statistics à la carte, without predicting the side effects.
This perpetual echo of improper appropriation of terms such as “empathy”, “proactivity”, “synergy”, “sustainability”, “diversity”, “tolerance”, “solidarity”, “community”, etc., feeds an implacable process of degeneration before the citizens, who, little by little, are becoming immune to their essence and native strength. Doubt prevails in the face of so much recurrent ambiguity.
As the process advances, the ideological roots from which these “concepts” were born fade away, the sacrifices prior to their existence are ignored, they are confused among a sea of economic, social and political wars unrelated to the realities of everyday life. Everything becomes unstable, while the red lines of non-negotiable principles until now turn gray.
Civic commitment is praised, but we are instilled with the culture of disaffection, of distrust towards the other. We survive the chaos, the improvisation of an insensitive bureaucracy, the abruptness of the loneliness that accompanies postulates of change.
The “Way of the Fist” is applied with special vehemence to the most vulnerable, despite the moralistic refuge posed by speeches filled with beautiful words. Without pity, they continue to ask for an extra effort from those who can no longer do it.
Beautiful words are tinged with lies in the hands of spokespersons who are experts in stirring up spirits, inciting predatory revolutions of concepts, of sacred principles.
We owe it to ourselves to avoid interested distortion, false adhesions that weaken them.
