The press has echoed these days of the prohibition of a lecture, in a Spanish public university, for reasons of ideological discrepancy. This brings to my mind report epochs of the past that I thought were happily overcome. Those who demanded the ban wielded, for all arguments, that the lecturer who was denied the floor was suffering from homophobia. Before giving him the floor, he was diagnosed with a disease: beware, he is a homophobe. And unlike other patients, who should be pitied and offered support and solidarity, the homophobic patient should be singled out, given a label, and a cordon sanitaire put in place, lest he spreads the disease to others.

This strategy of pathologizing those who ideologically disagree with the dominant thinking is not new. The former USSR and Nazi Germany made extensive use of it. What is strange is that even today, and in university circles, this form of disavowal without argument, so common when it comes to political correctness, is practiced with impunity. Because by labeling certain ways of thinking as pathological behavior, those who think differently are being rejected and excluded from the normal world, from civil society, and all this without taking the trouble to reason and argue. For lack of arguments or because of gregariousness and mental laziness? In any case, it is a resource typical of times in which rationality is valued at leave even in the very University. "Where everyone thinks alike, in reality little thought is done," wrote Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

And here we have the denomination of a new disease, homophobia, turned into an insult. This inquisition of political correctness is used to insult, to disavow, instead of arguing. One more way, and a very toxic one at that, to pollute the social atmosphere, which hinders communication between people. Moreover, insulting words, as Kafka said, are a prelude to violent actions, because playing with words is playing with the truth, and playing with the truth is playing with life.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing to do today is to ignore olympically the thousand and one trifles of the manuals of political correctness. Which is, by the way, what everyone does when they turn off the microphone and step down from the podium.

Could this kind of allergy to rationality be an affliction - to continue with medical metaphors - of the post-truth or post-thought (Simone) era in which we seem to be settled? We will always have the consolation of euphemism to be able to say, with T. S. Eliot, that we live in a world that "moves backwards, progressively".