The lawyer specializing in Human Rights, International Law, International Criminal Law and Psychopathologies and Neurosciences, Dr. Cynthia Castro, analyzes why we must vote with conscience to defend humanity.
Human history shows that every time people forget to think, others think for them. And when fear dominates the collective mind, authoritarianism flourishes.
Today, Argentina is going through a time where emotional manipulation has become state policy, and hate speech is disguised as freedom.
From neuroscience we know that leaders who stir up resentment, anger or frustration activate the most primitive brain regions in society: the amygdala and the limbic system, responsible for fear and reaction. In this state, rational thinking and empathy—functions of the prefrontal cortex—are turned off.
When that happens, The people stop reasoning and begin to obey.
The current government feeds on that mechanism. It promises freedom while cutting rights, claims to fight corruption while normalizing privileges, and talks about morality while dismantling all public ethics. Through constant insults, public humiliation and the trivialization of other people’s suffering, a political model has been built based on emotional overexcitement. The people are provoked to the point of exhaustion, they are divided to the point of exhaustion, and they are confused until they no longer distinguish between freedom and helplessness.
The president who claims to fight corruption promoted the “Libra” currency, a global speculation project promoted by financial corporations, and today he surrounds himself with interests that represent exactly what he promised to destroy and, worse still, narcoliberalism has been exposed from his own political bloc. The double standards deepened when he should have removed his own sister Karina at the slightest suspicion of corruption, in her famous 3% bribe on funds intended for people with disabilities.
The vice president is the most dangerous face of this government’s indifference, because she uses faith as a screen. She declares herself Catholic although she denies her neighbor and, using the name of God as a shield, she maintains a discourse that expels those who most need comfort. Talking about values without practicing equity, truth or compassion implies emptying those values of content.
The contradiction is not only political: it is moral and neural.
These contradictions are not simple discursive inconsistencies: they are moral fractures. In neuroscientific terms, they reveal a process of empathic atrophy, where political power is detached from all prosocial emotion. Political psychopathology describes this phenomenon as cognitive dissociation: cruelty is rationalized until it becomes public policy. And when that happens, human rights—which were the highest result of the ethical evolution of the human brain—become an obstacle to power.
Mirror neurons—those that allow us to feel the pain of others—turn off due to overexposure to contempt. Symbolic violence becomes a landscape, and the suffering of the other stops moving. That is the prelude to dehumanization.
Human Rights were not born from a progressive luxury or from an ideology, but from the memory of horror. They are the moral vaccine that prevents humanity from repeating its crimes. However, today they are ridiculed, branded as an expense or a whim. But where rights are relativized, barbarism begins.
History warns about these processes. In interwar Germany, in fascist Italy and in Argentina in the darkest years, authoritarian leaders presented themselves as saviors in the face of chaos. They promised order and prosperity, but they did so at the cost of critical thinking, a free press and human dignity. Denialism, censorship and the exaltation of the internal enemy were always the preludes to civilizational collapse. Today, in the 21st century, that same script is repeated, covered in liberal rhetoric and a supposed anti-communism that only covers up social contempt.
The advance of this dehumanization is not accidental: it responds to a strategy of neuronal colonization. When people are bombarded with messages of hate, when solidarity is ridiculed or competition is promoted as a supreme virtue, the circuits of the social brain are reconfigured. Empathy—that function that allows us to recognize others as similar—is deactivated. What follows is the fragmentation of the collective fabric, extreme individualism and indifference to suffering.
Every cut in health, education or science is not just an economic decision: it is a symbolic mutilation of the Nation’s nervous system. When research is abandoned, social intelligence is turned off. When culture is disregarded, the neural flow of identity is interrupted. When teachers, scientists or human rights defenders are attacked, what is destroyed is not a sector, but the cerebral architecture of the country.
From Human Rights, this regression is unacceptable. No democracy can be sustained if the guarantees that protect the most vulnerable are dismantled. The contempt for historical memory, the denial of State terrorism and the vindication of the repressors are not isolated acts: they are unequivocal signs of a dangerous ideological mutation that threatens to reopen wounds that have not yet been healed.
In these legislative elections, what is at stake is not a seat: it is the mental and moral health of the Republic. Giving legislative power to those who insult, attack and degrade public debate would be to institutionalize violence as a method of government. The scenes of deputies out of control, hitting each other and screaming in the chamber, are not anecdotes: they are symptoms of an ethical disintegration that threatens the democratic balance.
A Congress dominated by impulse, resentment and ignorance would be a tragedy for institutional balance. They would not legislate with ethics or knowledge, but with adrenaline. The function of Parliament—thinking, debating, analyzing—requires precisely the faculties that Milei’s speech nullifies: reflection, empathy, and the capacity for agreement. The National Congress has become a laboratory of destructive impulses.
A Congress dominated by Milei’s fanaticism would legislate under the impulses of a social brain sick with hate. Therefore, voting with conscience is not a political act: it is an act of neuronal defense, a way of preserving collective reason against the advance of hatred, manipulation and the collapse of social empathy.
Neuroscience shows that people can reconfigure their social brain when exposed to different stimuli: education, art, truth, justice and cooperation strengthen the neural connections that sustain coexistence. Therefore, the challenge is not only to resist politically, but to reactivate the synapse of collective consciousness.
To think together again, to feel as a community, to recognize ourselves in each other.
The collective brain has a silent force: when it awakens, no authoritarian power can dominate it. The true revolution is not made with a chainsaw, but with a synapse. Every act of critical thinking, every gesture of empathy, every conscious vote, is an electric discharge that illuminates the future.
Because the collective brain awakens when the people remember, when they choose not to hate, when they believe in human dignity again. And only a conscious people, with memory and love for the truth, can overcome dehumanization and rebuild a country where Human Rights are not a slogan, but the living structure of our moral evolution.
A collective brain when it wakes up, votes with conscience, defeats dehumanization and restores dignity to the people.
by CONTENTNOTICAS
