By LEONARDO BOFF*
If we do not articulate reason and sensitivity, mind and heart, we will hardly move to defend those who are being sacrificed and martyred.
In the XNUMXst century we are witnessing what has been called “the era of eternal war” carried out particularly by the United States of America in all parts where its dominance over the entire world is called into question. They live the ideology of the “manifest destiny” of being “the new people of God”, to bring (bourgeois) democracy to the world, human rights (individual, forgetting social and ecological) and the supreme value of the individual (base of accumulation capitalist). In this belief, they support with iron and fire unipolarity depending on the motto: “one world-one empire”, theirs. They will wage war to prevent multipolarity.
As we are writing, a cruel massacre of an entire people is taking place, the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, denounced as a true genocide, perpetrated under the Zionist Benjamin Netanyhau, with the unconditional support of the USA. Crazy reason is operating without any heart or human sensitivity, exercising its cold logic and without any scruples or ethical limits.
We know that sensitive and cordial reason is more ancestral than thinking reason. The first appeared 125 million years ago when, in the process of evolution, mammals emerged with the so-called limbic brain, seat of the world of affection and cordiality. When giving birth, the female is filled with care and sensitivity towards her offspring. We human beings forget that we are rational mammals, therefore, bearers of sensitivity, care, affection and love. This fact belongs to the DNA of our nature. Only from 7-8 million years ago did the neocortical brain, the basis of thought and conceptual rationality, form. Only in the last 100 thousand years did homo emerge sapiens sapiens of which we are heirs.
Note that the most ancestral is not the logos, but the pathos, emotional reason, cordial and sensitive. We are rational beings, but based on the universe of affections, of sensitivity, in a word: the mind takes root in the heart. Here live the great values that guide us, such as love, empathy, friendship and compassion. As a representative of the Pueblo ethnic group from New Mexico (USA) stated to the great psychoanalyst CG Jung who visited them: “you are crazy because you assume that you think with your head. We, however, think with our hearts.” This answer made the great psychoanalyst change his perception of the human psyche that he studied so much. Jung understood why Europeans conquered the world through violence and wars: because they only used their heads without their hearts. They had lost the dimension of sensitivity and compassion. That's why they committed the greatest holocaust in history. In less than 50 years, according to the most recent research by Marcelo Grondin and Moema Viezzer (Abya Yala, genocide of the original peoples of the Americas) eliminated around 61 million inhabitants of the Americas (the USA from 1607). It was our forgotten Holocaust, the greatest in history.
The drama of today's man is having lost the ability to feel others as his fellow man, to experience a feeling of belonging to the same humanity, something that religions and humanitarian ethics have always taught. What is opposed to religion is not atheism or the denial of God. What is opposed is the inability to connect and reconnect with those who are different and with nature with a bond of affection and recognition. Today, a large number of people are uprooted, disconnected from their fellow humans, nature and Mother Earth. In Jung's language, they repressed the dimension of soul which responds to the expression of sensitivity, care, relationality with others and spirituality.
If we do not articulate reason and sensitivity, mind and heart, we will hardly move to defend those who are being sacrificed and martyred like the more than 10500 children murdered and more than 1500 under the rubble of air and ground attacks by the army of the callous and heartless. Benjamin Netanyhau.
Mere analytical-instrumental reason not accompanied by emotional intelligence becomes irrational and insane to the point of committing the Holocaust of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and 61 million representatives of our original peoples.
A science with conscience, careful, sensitive to everything that exists and lives that unites mind and heart is a precondition for avoiding massacres and genocide as we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, we will ensure that we do not devour each other and safeguard the vitality of planet Earth. Otherwise, it can continue, revolving around the sun, but without us.
Leonardo Boff He is a theologian, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Rights of the heart (Paul).
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