Things by name

"War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength." These are the three party slogans that crown the pharaonic edifice of the Ministry of Truth in the novel 1984. The manipulation of language reaches similar levels today.

I am not at all conspiratorial, but I think we are not far from the crushing dystopian society imagined by George Orwell. There, the so-called "neo-language" served the omnipresent Big Brother to control citizens; here, ideologies use language to sweeten what we would not swallow if they called things by their name.

The excesses of inclusive language, which sometimes verge on the ridiculous, or the steamroller of gender ideology, which threatens to turn anyone who refuses to say that white is black into a criminal, are only examples of a practice well known to rulers of all times.

The last ones to complain about the manipulation of the language have been the associations of large families that understand as an aggression the new law that the Spanish Government is preparing. In the explanatory memorandum of the draft bill, which has been revealed by the newspaper ABC, the Government clearly recognizes the ideological nature of the law, stating that "the family no longer exists, but families in the plural".

According to the regulation, the concept of large family disappears, recognizing instead up to 16 different types of families, including (what a thing!) the one composed of only one person.

Large families rightly protest that "if everything is family, nothing is family anymore", alleging the lack of recognition, in the current demographic context, of the social role they play.

In spite of the fact that, year after year, the family continues to appear in first place in the ranking of the most valued institutions, the truth is that, as social uses make it smaller and smaller and more fragile, its role is becoming more and more blurred. Some people already say that the real family are friends, because they are "the ones one chooses", so Big Brother is fulfilling, step by step, its social engineering project consisting of eliminating ties to achieve individuals who are more and more lonely, more uprooted, more dependent on the State and, therefore, more manipulable. Emptying the word family of its meaning, it brings us closer and closer to the herd -or to the pack or the flock, whichever you prefer-; it makes us less human and more that other thing they want to turn us into.

The name of things, and also of people, is essential to avoid confusion, to know what we are talking about, who we are talking about. What would happen if, in search of effective equality, we all called each other the same name? Well, the world would be in chaos, nobody would know who is who, not even oneself.

Today we celebrate, precisely, the feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, a term that means, in Hebrew, "God saves", clearly indicating the mission of the child. May we know how to call things by their name and not allow ourselves to be manipulated by these false saviors of humanity. Because humanity has already been saved by a simple man who learned to be saved and to bring this concept to its fullness in that school of humanity called family. His name, above all names: Jesus. Let us turn to him when we are confused.