This or That =- Right or Wrong - Us or Them
Well the last few posts have been dedicated to primal influences in our (U.S. and Western) culture that influence how we make meaning of things and thus seek peace and joy in life. So far we have considered industrialization which has dominated our work lives and educational systems, science or more specifically the scientific method which has dominated the way we gather and evaluate knowledge and elevated the notion that predicting and controlling how parts of a whole act can provide the Truth and what should be believed, television (or more generally the multimedia-visual input we bring into life using broadcast systems to present things on a screen and now we are looking into the fourth force—the tendency or need to look at foreign affairs and nearly everything else regarding others as a “dualism.”
I —yes I am starting with an open admission that this is a lifelong battle topic for me. I have never understood the gravitation that most people have toward categorizing other humans, where they live, and how they behave in a manner that is either like me or completely the opposite of me… Nonetheless just because I don’t quite understand this need it doesn’t make it any less powerful and so observations about it seem to be called for.
Now that I am of an age and all humans of an age, I can look back on a “lived through history.” I can therefore remember personally being taught that the communists the Russians were evil and wanted to take over the world. We were in the space race with them, we were in the arms race with them, We wanted to stop their advance and the advance of communists everywhere on the planet because once one country falls the next one could and would fall to these evil thinkers who are godless and such. Because we believed this so completely we held atomic bomb attack drills in school where we had to get under our desk and “duck and cover.” This meant we spent real school time teaching kids that a wood or metal desk would protect them if they were the target of an atomic weapon attack. However, if that were true why didn’t we just build our school out of that stuff our desks were made of? Oh and we were supposed to be quiet—why? We’re there some secret red spies in third grade who had a hot line to the folks in Red Square waiting to reveal our strategic location? Wait..I digress..
Well the point is that as time went by the Russians power and influence lessened and communism didn’t quite work out the way it was drawn up in real world terms. We learned that the Russians weren’t that great after all we could beat them in hockey and we made them tear down a wall in Germany. We beat them to the moon and we had better jeans and video games than they do… In short we couldn’t fuel what we did based upon beating them at something anymore. So now what. Well given recent historical events we find it really tempting to hate the Russians again but it’s not the old Russia. We could hate China but we pay them to build our iPhones cheap and so we can maintain a high profit margin. China pretends at communism but not when playing in the international market. So … with the lack of a global enemy we have faltered a bit in having something to be unified over. What then has happened?
Well that’s simple… we’ve turned that need to compare and divide on ourselves. We are either “red” or blue… Why can’t states be purple or yellow or aquamarine? Crayons come in big boxes with a sharpener built in (how many times did you ever use that? The big question is..why do we crave this simplicity? Are we afraid to live in the complicated stew of trying to understand people. Rather than trying to control them? It is easier to urge and oppose rather than understand and cocreate our circumstances. For so many people we have not been taught how to take advantage of the pieces of a puzzle to form a beautiful picture when just sorting things into two piles is so much faster. When survival of humans wad more dependent upon identifying creatures that could and would kill us dualism was a bit more important however, the last I time I looked I wasn’t brushing my Wooly Mamouth loincloth and chanting around this new-dangle cooking appliance called fire.
Okay the purpose of this entry isn’t to cast evaluations of humans out there …it is designed to bring attention to the notion that dualism is something shaping the ways we seek peace and joy and bring meaning to our experiences.
Now…that we have illustrated these four forces… it becomes time to provide some “implications” and that is the business of the next entry….
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