On Attacks on Linking

Human life is an exchange; it is a relationship. From the simplest to the most complex elements, these exchanges aim to develop something more elaborate that transcends us and gives us a greater capacity to respond to the challenges that human beings must face. This is how we advanced as a species, adapting, developing capacities, building community, protecting ourselves, caring for each other, constituting and reciprocally configuring ourselves in the links we form.

We are witnessing how devastating it can be when the possibility of exchange, social pact, mutual collaboration, dialogue, and respect for the rules of coexistence is broken in a language more akin to our daily lives: when the link is attacked. And this attack can take place in different ways, some more openly violent, some rather more veiled.

José Saramago said that trying to convince another is like colonizing their mind. Placing ideas, beliefs, objects, etc., that seem to be one’s own in the other’s mind is a way of neutralizing the other’s initiatives, their otherness, and appropriating their desire. This is a form of attack on linking that is often invisible but very powerful.

In a slightly less recognizable way, all the maneuvers seek to prevent the production and expression of emotions and affects that connect with others. In human relationships, emotions and affections allow us to articulate our thoughts, memories, traditions, beliefs, desires, etc. Together with language, which conveys their expression, they support the mediation between minds. Human development is impossible if emotion and thought go separate ways. It is already complex when they do not spontaneously relate to each other, and it is excruciating when some form of power expressly sets out to prevent them from connecting.

Attacking the link is like cutting, interrupting the cables that connect the lighting poles, which would leave the community without light, without means of communication, and without the ability to transmit and rec