Francisco Miraval
I began writing these weekly commentaries almost ten years ago. And I have been involved in education and community activities for several decades now. However, I ask myself with increasing frequency if it would be better for me to be an idiot, not in the insulting sense of the word, or in its psychological meaning, but in the meaning the word once had in ancient Greece.
For the Greeks of ancient times, the idiot (idiotes) was a person who, regardless of the level of his intellectual faculties or his mental abilities, has decided not to participate in “politics” (not the current meaning of party politics, but in the old Greek meaning of “politics” almost as synonym of “society.”)
In other words, an idiot was he who, after analyzing the social reality around him, understood the absurdity of that reality and preferred “to keep things to himself” (one of the original meanings of the word), contributing nothing to society, and trying at the same time to avoid being affected by such a society.
Obviously, idiocy was a defense mechanism, with a touch of anti-social behavior mixing unequal parts of indifference, fatalism, resignation, individualism, and narcissism to express the personal dislike for a society perceived to be corrupt and beyond redemption.
More than two and a half millennia after the starting point of the semantic evolution of the word idiotes in ancient Greece, it seems little has changed. Therefore, I keep asking myself if it would be better to accept the growing hyper-individualism and “focus only on my own things” (another of the original meanings of “idiot.”)
What is the point of trying to be part of a society where dialogue is increasingly difficult? Let us take the case of Ancient Aliens, the TV shows proclaiming visitors from other planets came to earth in remote historical times.
For reasons unknown to me, related perhaps to ignorance or to negligence, when the titled of the program was translated into Spanish, somebody mistook the two meanings of “alien” and suddenly the TV show became a program about elder foreigners visiting earth millennia ago.
Let us share an example in the other direction, going from Spanish into English. Several years ago, Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater wrote a book titled El arte de ensayar. The book includes a number of essays Savater wrote about famous thinkers and writers of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, when somebody wrote a review of that book in English, the reviewer took the word “ensayar” literally and the book was suddenly transformed into a work about Art of Practice, as if the book was some kind of manual with tips to improve the quality of rehearsals (practices) before the opening of a new theater play.
With so many clear examples of (intentionally?) distorted communication, I keep asking myself if it would be better to become a perfect idiot. Watching TV at the same time that I surf Internet and constantly check my text messages, I am very close to achieve that goal.