Perhaps, thinking that reality thinking that reality surrounding us is something objective, a world to navigate as if we were explorers - which is partly true, but things that give meaning to life inhabit levels of reality that one should not discover, but build. Reality is shaped on the basis of Reality is shaped on the basis of our thoughts. We build within our mind invented worlds that have concrete effects. This, according to Lou Marinoff Lou Marinoff, is the definition of psychotherapy, but after all everyone is the first psychologist of himself. In this sense, words - conceived as interpersonal, but also intrapersonal, language - possess not only a descriptive, but also a performing function. It is no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have always tried to limit the number and quality of words. The philologist Victor Klemperer Victor Klemperer wrote: «Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. […] Words can be like tiny doses of Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all10». It seems to me a description possible to apply also to the present day, and to that Italian politics to that Italian politics having an equally toxic language. �uality of words, therefore, but also quantity of them: in the fifties the anthropologist Robert I. Levy Robert I. Levy sensed that the high number of suicides recorded in Tahiti was due to the fact that they had words to describe words to describe physical pain, but not for psychic pain11. Lacking the words meant not being able to identify, contextualize, understand and therefore not being able to manage anxieties, depressions and the whole range of spiritual pains. The result was a dramatic loss, which often led to suicide. For all this, Ludwig Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us that the limits of our language mean the limits of our world12. E =O 113 10 Victor Klemperer, LTI - Notizbuch eines filologen, I ed. Aufbau Verlag, 1947 [I en. ed. The language of the Third Reich. LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, ed. Athlone Press, 2000] 11 Robert I. Levy, Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands, I ed. University of Chicago Press, 1973 12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, I bilingual ed. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., 1922
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=