There is no worse enemy of man than man himself. It is written in Genesis and in the DNA of any culture.
We kill each other. We are used to doing it and the media show it to us on a daily basis. Every day we receive our dose of dead. Even if we don't want to look at them, there they are, on the covers and inside pages. We cannot live without them. They put us on the good side of life, the only possible one.
The dead that we see in the photographs and videos, however, are not the real dead. First, because they are bodies rather than people, and second, because they have no identity, and without a name and surname there is no death that is truly dead.
Maybe its better this way. We prefer it. Better to live in fun than in reality. Better to jump from flower to flower, from series to series, from political scandal to political scandal.
These events, the fights in Parliament, the behavior of celebrities, the performance of athletes and economic values, take us from one day to the next without us really understanding how. They are fiction, as are the dead we do not know.
There is no policy of the dead because they are scary. They are frightened by what they can tell us from the mass graves and field morgues.
The war in Ukraine is on track to be deadlier than the one in Iraq. In ten months there have been 200,000 victims, between deaths and injuries, approximately half on each side, according to data from the Pentagon and the EU.
It is not known for sure how many people died in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, although most counts agree on a range of between 100,000 and 200,000. These are those who died violently as a result of the fighting. The indirect deaths were many more. A study by The Lancet estimated that there were more than 600,000.
Something similar will happen in Ukraine. The Russian army wants the families of Ukrainian soldiers to freeze to death. On Friday it launched the ninth wave of missiles against energy infrastructure. Each wave is made up of between 70 and 100 missiles. The goal is to leave the country in the dark, without water or heating. It is a war crime that will go unpunished.
Ukraine hides its dead as much as it can and so does Russia. We must preserve the morale of the troops and the spirit of the population.
Iran, however, has hanged a young dissident with a crane in full view in Isfahan. The theocratic regime needs to intimidate. He does have a policy of the dead.
The dramatization of death, unfortunately, is also common in the United States. We have seen the condemned and the stretchers on which their lives are taken. We have seen the paraphernalia of the executions and we have turned the page or changed the channel. What can we do?
We can applaud the Governor of Oregon who has commuted 17 capital sentences to life in prison. She believes that the death penalty is immoral, as more and more of her compatriots do. Executions in the United States are reduced, but not their cruelty. It is difficult for him to find the veins of the inmates to inject the lethal dose. It has happened in seven of the 20 executions this year.
There is no easy or painless death. That is why we prefer not to see, not to be aware of it. The dead do not exist. They were not people. They are and will be digitized data, fleeting images, soon replaced by new ones.
The incessant frenzy of information helps us to forget and not to think. Having lost the books, we have lost the ability to concentrate and reflect. Our judgment suffers. He too decays, victim of the stridency, the slogans and the viscerality that prevents us from seeing reality, the face of the dead who question us. Why do you live and I die?
There wouldn't be so many wars or so many executions if we could hold the gaze of the dead. We would not be so submissive to fate. We would learn to look further and stop being a weapon of mass destruction.
This learning, however, is difficult. We should start by ceasing to be the head of cattle to return to being individuals committed to our environment. But language fails us, the words that reconcile us with our being.
We build identity more with consumption than with ideas, more with external appearance than with internal reflection.
Just as there are no policies for the dead, there are also no policies for the living who need to know. Knowledge is conceived, primarily, as a good for industrial production, not for human achievement.
Power wants us immature, docile and entertaining, subject to the algorithm, to the propaganda that hides the dead from us and incites us to excessive consumption.
We feel free, but we are watched. Also in liberal democracies. Nothing escapes Big Brother's eye. 73 years ago Orwell showed us what we still don't see.
The dead like him would help us regain our free will. It would be enough if we had the courage to talk to them, to read a book to the end to learn to live without killing.
