A clear symptom of the wear and tear of a word is its incorporation into the speech of political correctness. When a word falls into this black hole (where everything fits because there is nothing and what enters loses its raison d'être), it paradoxically reduces its usefulness by increasing its use. Recently I was struck by a television advertisement promoting special products for lactose intolerant people and saying: "Zero tolerance to "that's a woman's thing". Zero tolerance to not feeling good - keep the good stuff!".

The text is not wasted. In addition to selling, with the final exclamation, the Philosophy of the mass-man and his "impression (...) that life is easy", against which Ortega y Gasset warned us a century ago, it adopts the euphemism of "zero tolerance", which has been gradually permeating our society. This syntagma, of recent origin, was born linked to speech against the so-called "gender violence" -another euphemism of political correctness: in language bad influences also work- and has been incorporated to other discourses against uncivic or criminal behaviors. The topic is once again in the news as a result of the sad data provided by the EU and some recent murders of women in our country.

In the face of the seriousness of status of violence against women, the euphemism of intolerance may go unnoticed, but its implications are also important. On the one hand, tolerance is presented as a quality in which there are different Degrees, including zero, the absence of tolerance, i.e., intolerance. On the other hand, the latter term is avoided, because to be intolerant is to be dogmatic, not to accept the relativity of truth. Obviously, speech is contradictory.

The error is understandable. At the basis of a civilized and democratic society are human rights as indisputable truth (absolute, not relative), based on the inherent dignity of the human being. Read in inherent that is beyond any external circumstance, be it a law, an opinion, the need to get out of the crisis or the conjunction of the stars.

But this dignity and its obligatory respect do not extend to acts and ideas. The prevailing belief is that we must be tolerant and respectful above all else, that every opinion is respectable and must be respected. The problem or contradiction arises when we are faced with behavior that goes against the basic principles of society; when we find that someone believes, for example, that men are superior to women and therefore have the right to mistreat them. Other similar ideas were that the Jews deserved to be exterminated or, more recently, that the defense of a religion was worth crashing several planes and blowing up some trains, killing thousands of people. What to do then? The maxim that "the most important thing is not to be intolerant" cannot be contravened, nor can it be denied, therefore, that these opinions "have their truth". The answer is to resort to the subterfuge of euphemism: we are not intolerant, we have "zero tolerance".

It is worth remembering here Machado: "Your truth? No, the Truth". Let us not deceive ourselves, not everything is relative, not all opinions matter the same, nor should we tolerate everything. If it were so, there would be nothing good or bad. Everything would be negotiable and we would not be able to censor behavior or opinions: everything would have to be allowed. It is aberrant that, frequently, these ideas are supported by Ortega's Philosophy . Ortega's perspectivism (who is little read, poorly understood and poorly explained) does not speak of multiple truths, but of different perspectives on a single truth, which, moreover, it is in our nature to try to reach: "Man is the being who absolutely needs the truth," he said. This implies that we should not be content to label everything as an opinion, subjective and as valid as any other. In other words, all humans are worthy of respect and as such have the right to freely express their opinions; but that does not mean that all opinions have the same value (or even that they have any value at all). No one would think of telling the doctor, when he prescribes us a syrup that we need, that "that will be his opinion"; however, the opinion of the neighbor who recommends another syrup "that has worked very well for her" seems to us to be a valid opinion.

Let us free ourselves from the dictatorship of political correctness, let us not allow freedoms to be above that which gives them meaning (human dignity) and let us not allow the contradiction that an opinion justifies the taking of a life or vice versa, that someone uses freedom of thought to demand approval for the taking of a human life.