La Voz de Galicia – July 4, 2025 →
The truth is that I had never used the word. I knew it, I understood its meaning, but I had never thought to use it. And the other day, during a conversation at my house, the singer-songwriter and communicator MJ Pérez started talking about people who pontificate on social media and in the news, and suddenly the little word (pontificate) stuck with me—and without realizing it, I’ve been using it all week. According to the second definition in the dictionary of the Royal Galician Academy, to pontificate is “to speak in a tone of self-importance or superiority,” which might very well be what we’re constantly hearing from national and international politicians. But I think pontificating is also a way of being and existing in the world that we sometimes can’t escape. All of us, at some point in our lives, have taken on that “pontiff” role when we talk about things we believe we know better than others, or about things we feel personally connected to. All of us, at some moment in our existence, have felt the need to instruct or indoctrinate someone—sometimes without even noticing. And precisely because we’re not always aware that we’re doing it, we end up accepting the idea that we have the right to pontificate about what we think we know without questioning the fact that maybe we don’t know as much as we believe.
In these times, with a clear example in US politics, pontificating has become an unfortunate constant. The more these leaders preach their theories about immigration, knowledge, history, or human rights, the more those doctrines are amplified by all those who, without knowing more than the content of a biased headline, go on to pontificate on social media about the dreadful importance of putting those ideas into practice.
