Humanity’s Greatest Agent of Peace: In Defense of the Insult
A couple of days ago, while on my way to the train’s cafeteria, I bumped into an overly wide lady wearing overly narrow heels. Her heel dug into my foot violently, and, amid the silence of the carriage, my outburst erupted with thunderous force. Spontaneous heeling is natural and beneficial to health. I am convinced that if I had kept it to myself, it would have hurt much more, and worse, as the lady would not have removed her heel from my little toe.
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The outburst is spontaneous, funny, useful, and de-stressing. It may be a bit rude, but I suppose rudeness also serves a social function. The swearing we expel at a stomp travels directly from the point of pain to the lips, without passing through the brain. That makes it amusing and harmless. It could hardly be rude.
Insults deserve a separate mention. They can be rude or not. It all depends on the talent of the person issuing the insult. Because, at the end of the day, the insult is an act of intelligence. I know that some people are going to be frightened by this, but the insult is humanity’s greatest agent of peace. If we couldn’t insult each other naturally, we would have to solve everything with physical aggression, and that, besides being exhausting, usually ends up ruining your suit. And that really is rude.
On the other hand, I think that, particularly in the political sphere, the insult is an economical way of defining personalities and actions in an effective way. It fulfills an almost encyclopedic function, consisting of giving a name to the mediocrity or wickedness of a politician. If we could not resort from time to time to the insult, the definition would be incomplete, and we would end up being too benevolent to those who do not deserve it.
Obviously, I’m not referring to the ABC of insults. I don’t know if those are rude, but they are boring. The successful insult requires wit and a certain sense of humor. The recipient of an insult only gets angry if they think it comes from the gut and not the brain. If you spin the insult well, the recipient might even feel proud. I remember a couple of occasions when a certain Spanish politician contacted me to tell me that he had never been called something so funny. To insult is an art.
In times of political correctness, the woke barrier has been set far away from the insult. We can’t even use perfectly normal words like male, female, black, or Chinese. So if we can’t use those words, you will understand that we can’t go that step further to reach the intended offense. As a columnist, my job would become completely anodyne if I had to write the way progressives want me to write. I have not spent 30 years endlessly reading books and learning the art of journalistic writing so as to not use 90 percent of the adjectives in the dictionary.
There are those who argue that a Christian should not fall to offending another because it is a lack of charity. However, it seems to me that, if a politician is useless or incompetent, hiding it is not only another lack of charity — to the voters who have the right to know that they are voting for an idiot — but also a lack of truth. Two sins for the price of one. So, even though my leading priests don’t quite agree on this point, one must insult more and better.
Finally, to insult is also an exercise in freedom. In politics and journalism, it is never personal, only business. In recent years, in short, I have dedicated all the derogatory adjectives in the dictionary (and many others of my own coinage) to Joe Biden, for example, but always to his public status as president of the United States, never to his status as a fossil from the pre-Proterozoic era.
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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