THINK

31/01/2018

Almost all cultures, since the beginning of time, have adopted hands as symbols. And almost all of them predominate on the left. The initial reason seems to be physiological and genetic: "We are rights of the hand, because we are left of the brain", that when developing to speak led to the dexterity, to the superiority of the right hand, so about 10 percent of humans are naturally left-handed and run, therefore, the fate of minorities. The utensils are made to be used with the right. In rock paintings, the weapons are carried with the right. Monkeys, who do not speak, do not share the asymmetry.

Closer to the present, Hindu prostitutes or dasis were divided between those of the "right hand" for Brahmins and those of the "left hand," who had no restrictions. In the villages of equatorial Africa cooks and eats with the right, and the woman who prepares food with the left is accused of witching and wanting to poison food. The Romans supported the left elbow on the couch and held the plate with the left, while they ate with the right. Greeting with his left hand was an insult.

From before Mohammed, the Arab peoples preferred the right. The Quran codified the inclination. The right side is to the right, it is the side of Allah and his Prophet. The left is unfavorable and servile. The right is the south, the wet and happy land of Yemen, while the left is the north, Syria, associated with bad omens. Even in the antipodes, among the Maori, the right side is life, strength, while the left side is misery and death. Sinister comes from sinister, coming from the Latin 'sinister', left-handed or fatal.

And to whom does it occur that Jesus Christ can sit in a different place than at the right hand of God the Father. Lucifer is always on the left in all iconographic representation. The right is the hand to bless, and to be the right hand of the ruler is to be his greatest support. The left is slow. It serves as a complement, but not to lead. That is why ruin the day getting up with your left foot. Ambidextrous is to be skillful with both hands, while its antonym, ambisiniestro, is to be clumsy with both.

In the dynamics of the French Revolution, on October 6, 1789, a multitude of people forced the transfer of Louis XVI from Versailles to his Parisian palace in the Tuileries. In the hemicycle of the theater of the palace the one that was already a revolutionary Assembly continued to gather. To the right of the presidency sat, as if by magic, the moderate partisans of a constitutional monarchy - to the English one - and to the left, the radicals of a republic without king, the contestatarios to the present day. The seal of political conceptions was thus imprinted. No democracy has escaped this spatial distribution.

They are called to abolish that legacy of the French Revolution. Such oppositions, they say, have blurred: the hemicycle distribution of political ideas is obsolete. Perhaps they imagine the distribution of opinions as the form of the universe in space-time, so that everyone can be everywhere. They are antigeometric distortions that produce the excess of peace.

Without ideological deviations, by cultural atavism, Hindus, and many others, eat with the right hand and the opposite with the left.