Us and Them

Friday, June 23, 2017

Moi: “If love and hate hardwired in us, what can we do to subvert the hardwires to the extent necessary to create a more just and equal world, something that nature perhaps never intended?”

Tu: “Love is like attachment (I feel like keeping this close) and hate aversion (I want to keep this far) in extreme forms. True love is liberating though.”

note: about Tu et Moi


This is contextual. Live in a place with 99/1 black or white people and the one is always the odd one out :) even according to the laws of perception. But the values we attach.. Are also cobtextual and more or less mindfuk

Dogville comes to mind. Shows how horrible a small town can be to a person [7:59 PM, 6/25/2017] Mr. Puneet Kishor: Dogville is an astounding movie, both for the depiction of our inherent violence and power structure as well as for the creative way it depicts all this.

Two scenes are stuck in my head: One, when she is raped and has to suffer it silently as she is at the bottom end of the power structure. And two, when the power structure is flipped, the definitiveness with which she orders the village people, including children and women, to be shot and killed
[8:00 PM, 6/25/2017] Mr. Puneet Kishor: That brings to fore the perennial question: what would we do when we would become capable of doing anything?
[8:01 PM, 6/25/2017] Mr. Puneet Kishor: And, of course, the role of forgiveness and compassion in healing

us and them

I was reading a depressing article about Turkish schools going to stop teaching evolution. The following para in that story stuck out at me:

Many in the religiously conservative element of the president’s support base admire his piety and see his ascension as a defeat of the elite “White Turks” – a westernised elite that used to dominate the upper echelons of society and was accused of looking down with disdain on poorer, more religiously inclined citizens.

That sounded familiar to me from the US-context as well, especially given our recent election. That seems to be a recurring theme – we get educated, secular, better informed (?), tolerant (?), multicultural, etc. etc., in other words, completely buzzword-compliant. But in the process, we also become much of the opposite toward those who are not like us, disdainful, condescending, intolerant, and so on.

This lead me to this interesting read Why Your Brain Hates Other People

Us and them
And after all we’re only ordinary men
Me And you
God only knows
It’s not what we would choose to do

Down And out
It can’t be helped that there’s a lot of it about
With, without
And who’ll deny it’s what the fightingÆs all about?
Out of the way
It’s a busy day
I’ve got things on my mind
For the want of the price
Of tea and a slice
The old man died