The vitality of a political community depends on its capacity to conjugate the "we". It escapes no one's notice that in our country we are losing it by leaps and bounds. reference letter We seem bent on eliminating the first person plural from political grammar or, even worse, on adulterating its meaning: when we speak of 'we' we no longer refer to all citizens, but only to those who are part of my party, collective or group identity. The 'you' and the 'they' run the risk of becoming foreigners in their own homeland.

It is now commonplace to blame the cause of our political problems on polarization. However, it does not seem to be an entirely accurate diagnosis. However harmful it may be to understand social relations as a friend/foe dialectic or a zero-sum game, the truth is that the confrontation of opinions, even extreme ones, is natural and healthy in free societies. On issues important to common life, unanimity of opinion is always suspect. War, military or verbal, is not the natural state of man, but neither is the peace of cemeteries. Everything alive is characterized by tension; to lose it is to die. For this reason, the fact that there are opposing positions and that they are vehemently defended in the agora is rather a sign of vitality. If we are concerned that others think differently, it means that others are not indifferent or alien to us. This is what is decisive: with their divergences and singularities, we consider them to be part of us. From Aristotle we learned that we are beings endowed with speech precisely in order to be able to dialogue - and discuss - about good and evil, just and unjust. And that this is the crucial task of the polis: to determine among all of us what the good life and the common good consist of, or, in other words, what form a just and humane society should take.

Social life has an inescapable ethical dimension. Politics cannot be conducted apart from morality. Thanks to contributions such as those of Michael Sandel, the mirage of the neutrality of public space has been shattered. Even in liberal democracies such as ours, any decision about what is just depends, in the final analysis, on the conception of what is good. In fact, everything indicates that -probably due to the law of the pendulum- in recent years we have ended up at the opposite extreme to neutrality: hypermoralization. Politics now tries to meddle in everything, imposing very specific conceptions of the human good that go far beyond the moral principles required for coexistence.

The healthy distinction between the public and private spheres is currently at risk. If we go down this road, we will end up, once again, in the imposition of the morality of some on all. This seems to be indicated by the way in which several laws on controversial issues that divide society have been passed in Parliament C . By invoking the strength of the partisan majority, practically no space has been left for those who consider them unjust; space not only to act according to one's own convictions, but even to think differently. This is no country for dissidents. This is a dangerous strategy, because it generates disaffection among those who do not see their legitimate reasons recognized. And the basis of social life consists precisely - as Hegel formulated it - in the 'I' being recognized in the 'we'. If social institutions are not kept out of the partisan game, they may end up losing their capacity to represent us all.

Certainly, society needs to make decisions about what is good and just in concrete and often peremptory matters. Majority rule is the system we have given ourselves for settling differences peacefully. However, the historical experience of the modern world should serve to remind us of the provisional nature of these decisions. Politics is fallible and those who exercise it would do well to avoid its greatest temptation: to place themselves above good and evil or, even worse, to believe they have the legitimacy to define right and wrong. It is perhaps Shakespeare who has best portrayed this in his plays: in 'Macbeth' he goes so far as to affirm that the powerful cannot be held accountable for their actions; on the contrary, it is they who establish the moral order of the world.

The sensible thing to do is to always keep open the spaces for dialogue with those who think differently and that the social majority of each moment is willing to change or rectify when necessary. What problem would there be in admitting that certain controversial laws can be reviewed periodically, in order to confirm or modify them? For example, in the case of permanent imprisonment or euthanasia, to mention two issues that often disturb people of different political sensibilities and for which the same moral principle is invoked: human dignity.

The idea that life in the polis aspires to perfect-that is, to make citizens better-is compatible with the certainty that their capacity to achieve this is very imperfect and limited, both by the nature of morality and by the freedom of individuals. The contemporary drift of politics seems to have forgotten that its first responsibility is to ensure life in common, the social us, which is a prior and more basic end than the pursuit of the good and the just. It is as if the hypermoralization in which we live had inverted the order and made us forget that, if the "we" is destroyed, all other efforts become meaningless.

In 'On Liberty', a work of great topicality, Mill wrote: "The really fearful evil is not the violent struggle between different parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of one half of the truth; there is always hope when people are forced to hear both parts". It is a vindication of the social us. The fallibility of the human knowledge goes there together with the confidence that every person wishes to know the truth. The others are a financial aid and not a threat to the development of one's own convictions and political positions. Some will discredit this confidence in reason as the fruit of a naïve -philosophical- vision of the public discussion . The reality of power games does not work that way, it will be said. However, this apparent resource to realism hides, rather, the fear of admitting that another policy is possible.