Healthy bonds as an answer to polarization

Every person needs concrete expressions of love, to have someone at their side who looks at them with tenderness and helps them in everyday matters. In an audience, Pope Francis said that technology helps communication, but tenderness is exclusive to human hearts.  Technology “can do many things, but there is one thing it cannot do: give tenderness. Tenderness is the sign of the presence of Jesus, getting close to one’s neighbor, helping, sacrificicing oneself for the other.” [1]

It is urgent that we promote a covenant culture of welcoming the other; we all belong to each other as humanity. If we do not take care of each other, there will be no tomorrow. Pope Frances affirms: “There is no worse alienation than the experience of not having roots, of not belonging to anyone… a nation will bear fruit and will be able to generate a future only to the extent that it gives life to relationships among its members,”[2]

Extremism generates violence

Extremist thinking is always narrow and manipulative, it does not create healthy bonds. In a world with an almost infinite possibility of obtaining information and allowing everyone to express their ideas, it is paradoxical that such narrow-mindedness in the political sphere, and other areas as well, allows no other possibility but to position oneself  on the extreme right or left. There is much intolerance, divisions, aggressive relations, and lack of fraternal respect or respect for the authorities; an unwillingness to accept what others think, believing that only our political vision is the right one and finding nothing positive in what those who do not belong to my bubble do or say.

In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis affirms that “today, in many countries, the political mechanism of tormenting, exaggerating and polarizing is used… others are denied the right to exist and to think, and, to this end, they resort to the strategy of deriding them, insinuating suspicions about them and repressing them. One does not accept their part of the truth, their values, and thus society is impoverished and ends up reduced to the arrogance of the strongest”.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman states that in the “liquid society”, evil also becomes liquid and people act aggressively, as if it were normal to deny those who are different the right to exist [3]. In this way, all those who “belong to another group” are treated as inferior and enemies.