When we face the issue of Human Rights, the concept of dignity of the human person arises almost spontaneously, and we certainly feel that we are working on the knowledge of a perfectly clear topic, on which everyone agrees.
Despite this perception, healthy, by the way, the dignity of the human person deserves more than a word and reflection. Clearly, we do not need more efforts to appreciate, very objectively, that in front of a human person, we find a being different, special and different from everything that exists on the planet.
We grasp, rather than by knowledge, by intuition, that in the other there is something in which we reflect remarkably and that it is not the material or the physical, but, in terms of what multiplied in each independent and unitary being, is proper and common to the same time for all individuals. This is not a value or a measure of being a person. More than that, it is the substance or the essence that belonging to all, is found particularly in each one, giving the person a special character, exclusive of this quality.
It would be useless to bring to this brief work the concepts of the Greek philosophers, or the Enlightenment or Modernism, because, more than a logical understanding or a scientific definition, the concept of human dignity, is a matter of conscience formed in thousands of years for the development of knowledge and the formation of the social conscience of humanity, driven in recent decades by the doctrine of human rights.
From Hamurabi to Jesus and Aristotle to the Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man, everything has added to acquire and develop the concept that the human person protects in himself, the properties that society requires for his survival: The Right to Dignity.
The origin of the dignity of the person represents another desperate intellectual effort to unravel the mystery of this enigma. But is it really a problem that we must make strenuous efforts to elucidate? The truth is, no. The dignity of the person is part of herself, of her essential attributes such as life and physical and mental integrity. She comes to this world wrapped in it and does not separate under any circumstances, because it is not found in human commerce, it is not transferable, renounceable, disposable and complete.
The latter insofar as it cannot be separated, divided or minimized. The dignity of the person is her life. The superior and universal breath that integrates it into the social, geographical and human landscape with all that corresponds to it, by the mere fact of existing.
Our political society recognizes this idea and expresses it in the first article of the Fundamental Charter: “People are born free and equal in dignity and rights”
In other words, when he comes to life, he brings with him, as an independent being, his own dignity, as well as his own life, and along with it the rights necessary to develop as a person. Life and Dignity, come to be the same legal asset integrated into the conceptual triad Life, Dignity, Rights.
Without a doubt, there is an intuitive link between Life and Dignity.
This has been understood by the legislator when establishing as Constitutional Guarantee the respect and protection of private life and the honor of the person and his family. (art. 19, No. 4, CPR). Furthermore, the exercise of any right cannot be conceived if it is not integrated into this essential value of the human person.
Thus, physical and mental integrity cannot be protected by personal dignity. What would be of human life without the corresponding dignity? Even when we see in the third world towns and in the different imperial capitals how life and the physical and mental integration of the human being are corroded by social vices: misery, drugs, prostitution, alcoholism. How can each of the rights established as Man's own in the International Statute be appreciable in its true dimension?
Honor and private and personal and family life is largely the legislative response to the recognition of the dignity of the person along with the right to life and physical and mental integrity. These are known within the very personal rights, in as much, they integrate the notion of person as a physical and somatic entity, so they deserve a notoriously careful protection on the part of the constituent, integrating the right and protection of private and public life and the honor of the person as of her family.
Jurisprudence has not been less demanding. This is demonstrated in the ruling of the ECS, of June 15, 1993, role 21053, which expresses "… respect for private life, dignity and honor of the human person and the family constitute values of such hierarchy and transcendence that political society is organized precisely to preserve and defend them, so that no conception of the common good that allows their sacrifice can be admitted, nor make such sacrifice a means for another constitutional guarantee to prevail. "
In other words, even assuming the loss of the beauty of expression for the benefit of emphasis, society is organized in the State to preserve and defend the right to privacy, dignity and honor of the human person and his family. Any violation of these personal rights undermines the nature of the State, its organizations, its agents, and even individuals, since it breaks with the specific purposes of the supra-individual entity, corroding the bases for which it was created.
The Chilean State and its agents, on many occasions, have violated personal rights. An example of this is the situation experienced by FAS, who when requesting the Civil Registry and Identification service to terminate a paper inscription that made him appear as heir to a person who was not his father, the Service, not only denied the solution. peaceful of the irregularity, but it removed for more than six months the total identity of this person, remaining by virtue of a vicious administrative act, without legal identity for that period. This is the right of habeas data, that is, the right to demand from the State the antecedents of life and the correction of the existing ones, a matter that is found in the concept of dignity that we analyze.
From here we can point out that the qualification of human person resides in the collective need to gather the equals with the purpose of protecting and developing the capacities of the individual, in function of themselves and of society. One cannot understand the isolated man, just as one cannot understand rejecting the individual for his lesser capacity.
All of them, in their globality, achieve the maximization of the common good, both materially and ethically, essential elements for the survival and recognition of the individual as the basis of society, that is, as a person.
The dignity of the person is objectified and made palpable and is recognized by law as the element that structures the essence of the individual, in which all of society has its central column.
The plague of the 21st century.
But man is always affected by social ills, derived from the mistaken conception of what man himself is and what his East is. Today more than ever the peoples of the five continents are convulsed with warlike conflicts in which humanity is bleeding slowly, almost imperceptibly, but at a safe pace. Misery also attacks more than 2,800 million human beings who are struggling in the most appalling hunger. Plagues and diseases such as HIV, are the torture of African and Asian societies and the wars of predation promoted by de facto entities, attack the dignity of the human person as never seen, even in the darkest times of the Inquisition.
This is not all. It has been detected for years, as man, the wolf of man, discovers new and sinister forms of destruction in the home, businesses and schools. Moral harassment, Intra-family Violence and School Harassment are part of this new perversion that breaks into peace and social tranquility. Chile has the sad record of 75% of abused children; more than fifty couples murdered by those who must live in harmony in the construction of a home, and more than a third of the active mass of Morally Harassed workers. All this provides eloquent figures such as the fact that more than 40% of Chilean citizens are under depression because of these ills.
Not yet evaluating that the stalkers by essence have undeniable psychopathic characteristics, because, they act on the basis of an ephemeral and temporary power, driven by their own mental defects.
The dignity of the human person, man, woman or child, has been attacked by psychological violence, in addition to physical violence, but we are interested in unraveling the former, since it is one that moves in almost invisible spheres, leaving behind a sort of valley of the fallen, formed by hundreds of people who over time have seen their lives and that of their family destroyed, as an immediate effect of the persecution and harassment suffered in their functions and jobs, whether by their superiors hierarchical or by their own peers.
Moral harassment slips through the offices of companies and public services like a snake, stealthy and creeping, capable of dealing permanent blows to the dignity of the person, in a senseless persecution, without cause or for trivial or insignificant reasons, but that before the psychopath they translate into a feast of opportunities to destroy, overwhelm, discriminate, harass, offend, mistreat, allowing themselves in a more or less short time, six months as Dr. H. points out.
Leinzman, for what he understands as characteristic, or less in the case of our violent and direct idiosyncrasy, at the end of which the harassed person is in an unfortunate state of mental health, which in some cases has produced suicide. Of such gravity is the attack that isolates and isolates the victim individual and on many occasions, takes refuge in himself, increasing his suffering, what the psychopath is, precisely, what he is looking for.
If we were in a solidary social system, many hands would be extended to the affected. But, our society loses in charity what it gains in pride, and they tend to sense the fear that the harasser causes, leaving the victim alone. It is what is observed and verified in real spaces. Especially in the state services or in its organs, affected by the sectarianism of groups and brotherhoods. A dramatic example is described by the journalist Oriana Zorrilla in her work "When the state punishes", a reflection of what happens throughout our country.
In this way, we have approached the concept of human dignity, and for the purposes of moral harassment, psychoterrorism or mobbing, with the aim that workers, parents and authorities, keep in mind what is called the "plague of the 21st century", and inequities that affect people and the most essential of Human Rights are avoided: the life of the person and his dignity as such.
