La Voz de Galicia – July 26, 2024 →
It’s curious to think about the number of realities around us of which we know little more than what the headlines we read in the media tell us. Headlines that, unfortunately, are designed so that we, the customers (or victims) of the “attention economy,” click on those news stories created to feed our own biases. Headlines created from those increasingly minimal phrases uttered by politicians to convey their maxims. Maxims (many of them radical) that end up further fostering all those stereotypes that divide society into groups that no longer even consider the idea of listening to each other, much less understanding each other.
We know that when everything is reduced to a single phrase, to a stereotype that, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes intentionally, we end up assuming as a truth, all the values upon which democracies are built are at risk. But I want to believe that our curiosity, in its sense of “desire to know, to learn, to discover new things” (RAG), and our empathy, could save us from ourselves, from our way of not listening, from our way of not delving deeper, and from our way of always wanting to be right.
In this digital age, it is increasingly difficult not to be carried away by these minimal ideas. It is becoming harder to embrace the notion that there are no absolute truths and that being wrong is an opportunity for learning. And since these are complex times, both here and on the other side of the world, perhaps we should make more effort than ever to fight against that lack of curiosity that makes a part of society no longer even care to get to know those they consider the other.
