Living without tags

(ES)

A man holds his child who has been wounded by an explosion in recent fighting, at an Outreach Therapeutic Centre Programmes (OTPs) on the edge of the African Union (AU) peacekeeping military base on April 3, 2010 in Mogadishu
© Siegfried Modola/IRIN



Intelligence could be defined as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings.

This capability allows humans classify, sort and tag their thoughts, their memories, their knowledge, perceptions ... ultimately, their lives.
We tag everything; our lives and the world around us. We classify our photos, do lists of friends, we tag our memories, we share our lives with those who think alike.
The paradox of a diverse world increasingly global and interconnected is that we feel safer to belong to our little tribe, all with the same tags, and we are afraid of other tribes that differ because their labels are different from ours.

The sense of belonging is an inherent human need to the extent that we are social beings. The problem arises when the defense of the identity of the group turns to violence to other groups that are considered rivals. Today's world is increasingly polarized towards confrontation between different identities. I would even say that there is interest of world powers, in their zeal to control scarce natural resources, to produce such identity conflicts within the borders of less developed countries, to the extent that such conflicts inevitably delay the progress of these countries, which, in turn, are sources of much needed resources to rich countries.

If for a moment humanity was able to forget the tags, we will find that we have many more things in common with our peers than those that separate us. That has been, is and will be always the problem of tags, which in general do not let us focus on the essentials. And the essential is so general that very often goes unnoticed.

We are all equal.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.