Challenges to Dignity and Human Communication: The Deep Configuration of Abuse and Institutional Violence

Abstract

The article analyzes the need to promote humane and dignified communication in the context of the current polycrisis, starting from an examination of the origins of institutional abuse and the social engineering that sustains it. The main objective is to understand the mechanisms that configure institutional violence by addressing its objectives, interests, and needs through three analytical axes: power in its ideological, remunerative, and punitive dimensions; domination, understood as the vertical division of labor based on exploitation, fragmentation, and penetration; and the culture of fear, which operates through submission and dependency. This framework is embedded in a bureaucratic, communicative, and techno-feudal model that functions as a structural pattern shaping both public and private institutions.The methodology adopted is theoretical and critical in nature, grounded in structural power analysis and development theory, articulated through the dichotomies exploitation/equity, fragmentation/solidarity, and penetration/autonomy. The study identifies institutions permeated by multiple forms of violence direct, indirect, cultural, symbolic, and structural whose effects may be either visible or invisible.A second objective of the paper is to explore alternatives for the construction of more horizontal, humane, and relational institutional models, both at the intrainstitutional level and in interactions with the populations served. It is argued that a profound understanding of institutional violence is a necessary condition for raising awareness and for the recovery of human dignity.The article concludes that a form of social engineering oriented toward a dignified humanity through peaceful means requires addressing the psychosomatic dimensions of violence trauma, guilt, revenge, reciprocity, and irreversibility in order to intervene in norms of reciprocity and to break the vicious cycle of vengeance. Awareness and peaceful communication are thus established as essential dimensions at all levels of transformative action.