Journalist and University Professor
2 January 2022
HAPPY FLIGHT 2022!
Many times I imagined life as a finite journey on a ship called planet Earth. A journey of 365 continuous days; in leap years, 366. The flight includes a round-trip around the Sun star. According to statistics, about 60 million, of the more than seven billion on board, will not finish the journey. Another 140 million will board flight 2022 at some date. In sum, the new passengers who get on the ship will be more than those who get off for different reasons.
And who is the Earth pilot? Us. Therefore, it is up to us –the passengers– the comfort of flight 2022 that we started hours ago. We will go through the same months, through the same stations, and (most likely) we will see the same people of flight 2021 during the journey, but the facts and the results may be different if we essentially change some aspects, including hate speech.
The American journalist Susan Benesch, founder of the project “Dangerous Speeches”, developed, supported by the three dimensions of rhetoric according to Aristotle, five criteria to determine when hate speech becomes dangerous language.
- Hate speech is dangerous when the speaker is powerful and has a high degree of influence over the audience.
- It is dangerous when the audience is easily influenced and vulnerable because they have feelings of grievance and fear that the speaker can exploit.
- When in a speech act he clearly calls for violence.
- When the social context or the historical context is conducive to violence.
- When the message is disseminated through a media outlet that is influential in itself, either because it is the only one or because it is the main source of news for the audience.
On flight 2021, in the space called Bolivia, there were powerful speakers with a high degree of influence who spread their message to a vulnerable audience. These messengers of death stirred up feelings (resentments) with accumulated myths and infused fear of the other with fallacies.
At some point during the journey, some of those speakers called frontally to annihilate the different ones. Others created an adequate socio-historical context to meddle the most atavistic feelings in the easily influenced beings. The confluence of the language of hate unleashed violent actions. A little more, [and] we ended flight 2021 badly.
What to do to make 2022 a happy journey? Apply the power of the word against the language of hate. Doesn’t power consist in the ability to get what you want? Therefore, where there is a will, there is a way.
But who gets what, how, where, when. British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash quote American geopolitical scientist Joseph Nye and British political scientist Steven Lukes to explain the three dimensions of power.
The first, and most obvious, is to get someone to do something that, at first, was not among their priorities. Get a person to do something.
Second, power involves the setting of an agenda, or “the power to decide what is decided.”
The third dimension, and the most subtle, is the ability to shape people’s initial preferences in such a way that they do not even realize that their choices result from a prior exercise of power by others.
Information and knowledge weigh in on the first and second dimensions. Consequently, people committed to the search for the truth are forced to dismantle every fake news and post-truth so that audiences do not do something that was not among their priorities.
Truth, understood as the exact use of words to describe the facts, is synonymous with democracy; on the other hand, authoritarianism is a friend of lies.
Quality control of messages will raise the quality of audiences. As a result, these audiences will demand including public issues aimed at building and not destroying the public agenda.
During flight 2022, universities and non-governmental organizations (civil society) are obliged to produce and disseminate knowledge aimed at countering the lies fabricated by promoters of hate speech.
The third dimension summons creators who accurately describe reality from fiction: cinema, theater, novel. This group is capable of changing the conception of history and modeling refuting thoughts and erecting critical people.
The challenges are marked. It is up to us that flight 2022 is not turbulent and completes another orbit around the Sun with more humane beings and capable of coexisting on the Earth ship.
Happy journey 2022!
Source: http://www.cabildeodigital.com/2022/01/feliz-vuelo-2022.html
