correct words

Luis M Morales

The pleasure of understanding the world. Looking around and learning about the causes, consequences and secret mechanisms that determine events, protects us from deception and manipulation. This idea is the seed from which the study of history as we understand it today grows. In classical Greece, Thucydides left behind a simple account of events in their chronology and went further. He understood that the task of the historian is to identify and analyze the sources of human behavior. “History” in Greek means “inquiry”.

Thanks to this novelty, historians can explain to us, from their analysis of the past, many keys to the present. Thucydides, witnessing the collapse of democracy in Athens, noticed the symptoms of a crisis latent in changing the meaning of certain words. He believed that politics would deteriorate if subservience began within the factions called loyalty. If the public good is treated as looting. If we call him who conspires better, he is intelligent, and he who stops to think is a coward. If we talk about agreements only to cover up transient interest transactions. “When agreements were reached, the oath had temporary validity because each party took it hastily, without any further basis,” he wrote. The health of a community can be diagnosed by listening to his words.

Irene Vallejo