La Voz de Galicia – May 3, 2024 →
This is a world of contrasts, a world of contradictions. And our lives are also lives of contrasts and contradictions. One reads astonished the news from one side and the other, and it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why we are no longer able to even want to speak, listen, or negotiate. If everyone’s truth is an absolute truth, then there is no possible dialogue, and if there is no possible dialogue, then there is no hope.
We see it globally and also locally. We see it in the media, telling the same story but each one from their own truth, creating contradictory narratives about the same things. We see it on social media, where everyone defends their truth above all truths, ignoring the fact that these narratives, like everything in life, are probably related to our way of seeing things, as they are linked to our own perspectives.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said a few years ago in an interview that «narratives are not fixed,» that «we change our narratives for ourselves, and we change them not necessarily deliberately»; and he continued with the idea that “the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago.” The collective narratives that form the absolute truths governing today’s polarization of society are increasingly dangerous because in those narratives there are no nuances. Everything boils down to binary thinking, in which there can only be two perspectives, one good and one bad, and regardless of which side we take, ours, whatever it may be, will always be the good one, the bad one is the other’s. But what is the real narrative? And how can we approach it without falling into that «binaryism» that is destroying society?
