As humans, we will always bear the curse of having to pay for our mistakes. Not only the mistakes we make, but the mistakes that those before us have made. This might sound obvious, but tonight I want to point out a few mistakes that might not be so obvious. I’ll start at the beginning.
In the beginning there were the dinosaurs. They hunted or foraged during the day, for the most part, because even they could realise that at night they were more likely to bump into trees, rocks and eachother. Other than that they most probably saw little distinction between the times it was light and the times when it wasn’t. Then we came along.
Primitive man no doubt saw the difference between day and night. At daytime we could go outside of our caves, but at night it was dark, scary and cold. That’s when we made our first mistake. We distinguished between the two, and associated attributes to light and dark. The time when the sun was in the sky and we could wander around freely was essentially good, while night time became inherently bad.
This distinction was the most basic and profound mistake mankind would ever make, and it became the framework for how most of humankind would see the world, right until this day. Everything suddenly became divisible into one of two categories: good and evil. We constructed society, religion and the idea of nationhood around this one polarity, and it is our greatest weakness.
Ask yourself: have you ever met an “evil” person? I haven’t. I’ve met some thoroughly disagreeable people, and seen on TV those who are to be avoided in the interest of personal safety, but the distinction between good and evil is extremely difficult to quantify without coming up for a reason why your theory of what is “right” is wrong. More importantly, those qualities that we consider to be “good” are always internalised. We see ourselves as being in the “right”, and when something different from ourselves presents itself it is immediately seen as something else.
This sets up a polar relationship between “Us” being the good, righteous, freedom loving people of wherever, and “Them” the evil terrorists bent on the destruction of our way of life. This is extremely useful for a government. As George Bernard Shaw said: patriotism is the belief that your country is superior to all others by virtue of the fact that you were born in it. It is very easy to create a sense of national unity when there is a definite “enemy image” to cast that nation’s identity against.
National boundries, racial distinctions, class structures, even salary discrepancies are all arbitrary but very “real” differences (or rather, Derrida’s “Differance”
It is impossible for me to make you understand this unless you take it upon yourselves to actively dissolve millennia-old mental constructs. Why should you do this? Because then you will be able to see what our world has become.
More importantly, you will be able to see how unnecessary and just plain wrong most of the way our world has been depicted really is. When Bush or Cheyney stand up and say the word “Terrorism” a dozen times in a four minute speech, you will see a deliberate attempt at creating divisions and reinforcing the “Us against Them” dichotomy that keeps us all enslaved – instead of a rousing call to arms against what they would have us believe is a real enemy.
References:
Writing this article draws on many sources, some of which are reputable. I am indebted, as always, to the masterful Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist Movies (free download!), which don’t always contain the whole story, but show the fly the way out of the bottle.
Also, I regurgitate some of the work of Jacques Derrida
Lastly, there is a spattering of ideas from Edward Said and the philosopher, Hegel, without both of whom we might not know of the terrible things we do to one another in the name of our differences.
Your host
Norman Conquest
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