One of the reasons that lead many people to stay on the sidelines of politics is the confusion caused by the technical, scientific and technological interpretation, increasingly distant from the human condition, of everything that happens around them. If we pay attention, we see that policy makers have stopped using the word murder when talking about the death of a person at the hands of another in a violent way. The term murder, with all its religious and cultural load, is replaced by neutral expressions, without moral tension, such as “he was killed by a knife”, giving the tragedy the connotation of a regrettable event, the severity of which will be resolved in court.
The same thing happens when the determining role of passions in the exercise of politics is hidden and political maneuvers to preserve or achieve power are attempted to be explained as a simple game of parliamentary arithmetic; something that we have been able to verify these days in Spanish politics. It is passions such as power, freedom, revenge, justice, vanity or greed that most accurately show what moves some politicians to reach agreements or reject them.
By refusing to call things by their name, we have gone so far as to designate love as an emotional disorder, to distance ourselves and remove compassion, charity, faith, hope or consolation from the lexicon. It seems that the terms that show the scope of human behavior have to be displaced by technical interpretations, to make them bearable in the form of statistics and datafication. The advance of AI in people’s lives is criticized, pointing out that it dehumanizes them, but the lexicon is domesticated and trained until it becomes an idle pet, with no impulse to respond to the call of its nature. We must call things by their name again to reveal that, many times, political impotence is nothing more than laziness to act, that wars are a product of pride, that their fuel is hatred, and that social inequalities are a product , in large part, from human greed.
