One day, after a string of those prohibitions that we inflict on children always for their own good, your son protests: "I'm tired of so much no."
At his tender age, he already declares himself oppressed.
Perhaps we all feel at one time or another, like him, that something very ours suffers contempt and attacks.
You yourself grumble and lecture against disdain for the humanities.
Tzvetan Todorov wrote in
Memory of Evil, Temptation of Good
: “What is pleasant about being a victim?
Nothing, without a doubt.
But, although nobody wants to be, many wish they had been: they aspire to the status of victim”.
The collective lament for past grievances is part of the soundtrack of a democracy: the only system that recognizes the universal right to free complaint.
In the face of outrage, today we don't launch relentless challenges like Conrad
's Duelists
, who spend their lives fighting over some petty, long-forgotten offense.
The question of honor may sound ancient and moth-eaten, a fossil from the days of swordsmen.
However, in our thin-skinned, nervous and sensitive societies, we all claim respect.
In the opening scene of
The Godfather
, even Don Corleone, in his terrifying whispering voice, refuses to close a deal with someone who shows him no respect.
In
The Wire
or
The Sopranos
a snub is often paid for in blood.
Professionals in crime, so indelicate with the rest of the world, create their parallel legal code: loyalty among thieves and courtesy among murderers.
Already St. Augustine argued that even the bandits want the stolen loot to be distributed equitably: a recognition of the unjust to justice.
Here and there, one and the other demand respect for our ideas or desires, for language or memory, for our dreams and salaries, for peculiar tastes or family dislikes.
The society of the spectacle continues to call the public "respectable", and in the bloodless battles of the networks there are many contenders with a cruel verb but suddenly prickly in the face of criticism from others.
Although today we do not send godparents or slap with the glove, we are addicted to the approval of the other's eye.
As Andrea Marcolongo explains in
The Journey of Words
, “respect” derives from the Latin verb “to look” and shares a root with “perspective”: it alludes to focusing on others without disfiguring them or making them hateful.
In the etymology of “hate”, Andrea discovers a curious relationship with “dentist”, since it literally meant “toothache”.
Hating and despising corrodes like tooth decay.
Opposite the bellicose look, there is an old tool to stay afloat in this sea of susceptibilities: trust, that is, a friendly attitude without grinding your teeth.
It takes courage to trust others, but if we weave that network of cordiality, it will be easier to turn jokes into winks of healthy irony and crises into bonds of mutual help.
Faced with a collective calamity, we need to see in the other faces, not sides;
see each other as one of us.
Suspicion makes us lonely and unsupportive, suspicious and ineffective.
If we want to save the common home - the "oikonomia", the care of the house - without leaving anyone by the wayside, we need the courage to build a community, listening and also trusting those who do not share our ideas.
It's tempting to see someone who thinks differently as evil and malicious, but that's how we fall off the precipice of tribal politics.
Ambrose Bierce wrote that fights and litigation are machines that you enter like a pig and leave like a sausage.
A troubled river, profit of quarrelsome.
The ancient Romans knew that goodwill is at the root of exchanges, contracts, and collaboration.
Therefore, they worshiped a goddess called
Bona Fides
.
A large statue represented her as a young woman in white with her hand outstretched.
Her temple,
Fides Publica
, stood on the Capitol, a symbol of political power.
The only woman admitted to the summit of the empire was made of stone, but she sent out an all too human message: either we sail together or we shipwreck at the same time.
If we only see adversaries, adversities will defeat us.
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