Tent.,
Still, we must ask it of ourselves before we can ask it of others.
If I read this comment correctly, it is somehow applied to me. I rather do not proclaim “universal benevolence” or “Oneness” on my placard. Those that do, should be held to the inconsistencies of their rhetoric and consequences. I find such talk cheap to use, self-endearing, and often counter to what it claims for itself.
Dunamis
Good intention, JT. It might help a lot if we first expose some assumptions in this. 1) We assume that we could reach this “understanding of the illusion”, and 2) we assume that it is, or there is, an “illusion”.
If I am not mistaken, most of us, if not all, are actualist. (And if I am correct in my understanding), we believe that whatever we perceive actually, and that what we have a sense of actually are what make up our reality, hence you are up against common sense view of what’s real. Imagine telling someone off the street, and most of us are from “off the street”, about the concept of illusion. Now that’s what I call hard work.
I think the us-them thing expands and contracts, fluctuating with social-circles and the individual’s perceptions of his/her inclusion in them. A symptom of this perception is the frequency and degree of altruistic acts of the individual toward members of this group.
It was argued before on another thread that all actions are essentially selfish, either directly sating a need within the individual, or indirectly saving up favours for later. I didn’t really want to totally accept that POV, but can’t really prove it’s otherwise, at least to a degree that I’m happy with.
So - Altruism starts, like charity, at home. And home is where the heart is, ie: our chest, ourselves. We begin in a group of one. Us + everybody else.
Then we recognize family, our genetic peers. Me&My close Family + everybody else. The bonds of reciprocal love are such that those family members become such a part of your identity, such a part of the foundation upon which you have built your persona, that essentialy, you regard them as extentions of self. And in helping them, process it intuitively as the self helping the self.
Then we make friends. Good friends, close friends, outgrowing simple genetic bonds not of our choosing, and extending the self further, encapsulating strangers, and subsuming portions of their thinking and experience within our essential selves. “He’s my right-arm man” they say, again perhaps intuitively grasping that this is not a metaphor, but simple truth. And in helping/supporting them - again the physical self helps the diffuse self.
Then we love, taking one woman or one man, and foresaking all others. (Well - if we are good little boys and girls anyway 
) That person, in ideal circumstances, becomes a mirror, in which the self sees a perfected image of itself, and love splits in two, one part loving the provider of the image, and one part loving the image itself. Now the physical self not only helps the perfected self, but is willing to sacrifice itself… for itself.
[size=75][Forgive my bizzare phrasing][/size]
So, now the us group includes me, family, friends, loved one, loved one’s family.
Along comes baby. The spawn of two perfected reflected selves. Doubley loved, once for the present, and once for the potential future the baby holds, immortality, continuance of self beyond death. Now physical now-self helps next-self and future selves.
Now, baby needs a nice world to grow up in, one without too many sharp edges. Or equally pointy people. Now baby-making-Self realizes it can’t prevent baby-self from straying outside the current social-circle of extention-selves. So feels a selfish urge to expand these social-circles to incorporate… Well, shit, just about everybody, and while it’s at it, inanimate objects, like the world. All to forge bonds of altruism, indirectly (and perhaps vainly) to help create a world in which people are more likely to help eachother, and in particular - to help baby-self (and future-selves) survive.
So to get back to us/them, I’d say there’s a natural tendency to drift toward an eventual regardment of everybody (and possibly everything) as us-us. For the benefit of future us’s.
Kinda, maybe, perhaps.
[size=75][Quite a high baloney-rating to this post… ][/size]
To all,
Its obvious that I made some apriori assumptions to even begin this thread, and they color all of my rather obscure ramblings.
To even approach the concept of us-them there must be assumed good intentions and sincerity on the part of each of us. Several have pointed out that good intentions and sincerity may not be a good description of reality. I cannot argue with this other than that my view of humaness says that we have the potential to see others as we see ourselves. It isn’t that the pragmatic world we deal with every moment doesn’t include us-them, but that us-them is just a convenient construct that allows us to say “here” and “over there”. If we allow us-them to be set in concrete, we disassociate ourselves from “them”. We disconnect. “Them” can now not just be over there, but over there as an enemy to be destroyed. The illusion is the disconnected perspective that “them” isn’t just “me” over there. If I perpetrate violence toward “them”, I’m simply doing violence to “me”. What is lost to the illusion is that 'them" live as do we. “Them” goes through the day just as we do, They eat, defecate, work, have anxieties and concerns about themselves, their family, the world in general, and are just looking for a pleasant way to get through life. When we lose that perspective to an either/or us-them viewpoint, then all the malovence in the world is unleashed.
It isn’t about changing the world, but in changing how we see one another. I’ll still have the same conflicts I had a moment ago, but the shift in viewpoint, the realization, may change my approach to how I deal with “them”.
We’re better than what we’re doing, and perhaps asking for good intentions and sincerity is overly optimistic, (I too can be cynical) but it has to start somewhere - it has to start within each of us. To do other is to be part of the problem, not the solution.
JT
Oops, by “expose” I only meant to make explicit—make the assumtions explicit. (“Expose” has that negative connotation that I didn’t mean to say). My apologies.
I wasn’t being cynical when I said “good intention”. I meant that as a supportive comment.
I suppose I have to use more emoticons or something to make my point clearer. 
Hi Arendt,
I understood what you meant. No apologies necessary. Thanks for forcing me to be explicit about my assumptions. I’m the world’s worst when attempting to present a cogent statement. I need friends to keep me honest. 
JT
Well, first of all, duality cannot be avoided in practicality or in academics. If I know what you mean, I know what you don’t mean.
This is very stark when it comes to anything moral. If you have an idea of how people ought to treat each other, and that idea is worth talking about, it must be that there are people out there that don’t live up to your ideal. So Dichotomy is built into the system. Like Dunamis pointed out, “Death to the Extremists” of one flavor or another.
I understand what tentative is saying, and the benefit to it…my concern is that when he divorces it from practicalities, I’m not sure what real relevance it has. For example, let’s pretend that I’m a conservative religious zealot (I know it’s a stretch). If I meet someone, and they happen to mention they are a liberal wiccan or whatever, I don’t instantly tackle them and start punching them in the neck. Even people with a lot more hate in them than me don’t do that. In some cases, it might be fear of the law, but I think tentatives recognition of Oneness, that we’re all humans with our faults and a right to exist, is a big part of it too. The situations where violence or intolerance springs up actually are the ‘practical circumstances’ tentative talks about, the proverbial guy with a gun in my face who I drop-kick. Now, we may all disagree about what constitutes a worthy circumstance to resort to “Us vs. Them” thinking, but the skeleton is there- we all recognize the commonality of man, except in special situations where we need to kick a little butt. Let me address a few specific comments now.
tentative:
The setting of things in concrete is just what we otherwise call 'learning'. If the guys in the black uniforms marching over my border shoot at me the first 10 times I see them, they will probably shoot at me the 11th time too. It's inference, and sometimes it's wrong (racial sterotypes are a sort of inference, for example), but it's key to how humans think. There simply isn't enough time in our lives to re-evaluate every human we meet as though we've never met another person of their nationality, religion, culture or what-have-you. But essentially, the above is correct. When we see someone as "Just another Protestant" or whatever, we do disconnect, and things do get impersonal. Like I've expressed in private, I don't think this is a 'problem' that needs 'fixing', I think it's just a part of the human landscape- gravity may lead to broken bones, but gravity is not a problem in essence.
The problem is, this isn't enough to base any decisions or way of living on. I think most every adult is aware of things like this, and what it becomes is a [i]consideration.[/i] Ask any terrorist if Americans are people who are trying to find a pleasent way to get through life much as they are, and I'm sure they understand that. What they have decided is that because of the situation, the practicalities, that concern is overruled. If you agree that in [i]any situation at all[/i], it is necessary to jail, beat, or kill people who are 'basically just like you', then all that's left is to hash out the details of when it is and isn't appropriate.
Simply put, think of it this way- The problem with terrorists is not, obviously, that no one told them killing people is bad. Not only have they heard it, but as bizarre as it sounds, they probably believe it too. What makes them who they are is how they react to what they see as the practical concerns of the world they live in.
Hi Uccisore,
First, let me say that I agree with everything you’ve said. It was an apt description of how the world is and how it functions. What I might disagree with is that it must continue to be this way.
We don’t have to look far to see the results of abstracting ourselves away from one another.; The holocaust in Europe, The Japanese atrocities in China, our own atrocities in Viet Nam. The list goes on and on… This kind of violence can only be eneacted when we collectively disconnect from those we choose to be ‘them’. True, its always been this way, and perhaps it will continue forever, I deliberately stayed away from talking about the content of conflict or any of the rationalizations that might support them. They will remain. We will have even greater conflict as the world continues to grow ‘smaller’ and resources dwindle. Please know that I espouse no agenda other than knowing that ‘them’ are just like us. If that is even remotely true, then it isn’t a big leap to say that they are us and we are them. Pragmatically, it changes nothing but intent. As was mentioned by most of us, the guy with the gun pointed at my head is going to receive different consideration than someone sitting across the table negotiating out the compromises necessary to resolve a conflict. What I’m suggesting is far more difficult to execute than the simplicity of the concept. That’s a given. But to sit idly by and say its just our nature, or its just the way it is, is to deny our generation and those that follow any hope but to be on the winning side. We need to leave a better legacy to the world than that.
JT
I can’t disagree with that. My worry is, and has been, that the idea of ‘abstracting ourselves away from one another’ is so broad, so inimical, that it can’t help but be responsible for just about everything in human history- good and bad. Again, like gravity, you can blame alot on it, because it’s a catch all descriptor for everything we do.
What are you suggesting? If it’s just that we acknowledge that our enemies are humans with the same basic goals and fears as us, then I have to maintain that Hitler, the perpetrators of the Nanjing Massacre, and all the soldiers in 'Nam already acknowledged that very thing. They all just believed that their particular circumstances outweighed that fact. The Jews, the Chinese, and the Viet-Cong were the proverbial guy with the gun to your head who needs a drop-kick. Of course, I’m not saying what they did was justified. Now, there may be exceptions- the occasional evil sadist who just hurts people because he’s wicked. But, he’s not going to listen, and he might be a defeater for your model of humanity anyways, so I’m not considering them.
Sitting idly by, or picking a side and trying to make it win, are the only two choices in life, so far as I can tell.
Hi Uccisore,
I think that you are taking the back door here. I know that there are many encounters in my professional life that don’t warrant the re-evaluation you spoke about – although in my job there are a number of exceptions. But I am more than a professional person and I live in a world that offers me enough possibilities to re-evaluate. In private I don’t disconnect, although I am not always successful in connecting either, but I do try to connect and people, when they realise that my interest is genuine, do connect with me too. I think that this is what we should be expected to do in a healthy environment.
My understanding of the world is that terrorists are a minority who often don’t even have the support of the people they propose to be fighting for. They are the militant wing of almost any kind of ideology, and they generally believe to be fighting against some kind of injustice. I think that the idea that a terrorist doesn’t know that people in the west are trying to find a pleasant way to get through life isn’t realistic, after all, the 9/11 Bombers were students in Germany and were not outwardly militant. Some of them had a wife and children living in Europe – of course they knew.
I think the biggest problem here is that we try to fade out any idea that these people had anything that we could accept as an ideal. We also try to ignore the injustice that the historical record shows have been committed in our names. The attempt to make these issues black and white will not work unless you want a fascistic outlook on life, with a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. That is what we observe the military doing when preparing our soldiers for their task, which may be necessary for such people to survive in adverse conditions, but it can hardly be an accepted behaviour in normal conditions.
This may be true for the soldier who is placed in this situation, but not for the Government who put him there. It is the belief in some kind of supremacy that gives them the supposed right (or even the duty) to “cleanse†the world. This is the level where the crime is committed and the soldiers are just puppets on strings.
I agree with Tentative, we need to leave a better legacy behind us than we have found.
Shalom
Bob
I don’t disagree with you. We ought to try to do these things. What I’m saying is, nearly everybody does, including the most violent or evil sorts of people who come to mind. There may be a few people with brain disorders who can’t ever connect with anyone, but in general, people acknowledge this stuff- they go on to do bad things anyways, because as everybody knows, there are situations in which these rules of civility don’t apply.
Yes, that's correct, and my point entirely. They were aware of the principles tentative talks about, they lived by them in their day to day lives (they would be raving animals if they didn't), and yet...they blew up thousands of people. Why? Because of practicalities- they had a good reason (to them) why those people in that building on that day were exempt from the usual "mutual respect and civility" rules.
Well, let me illustrate what I mean. The Germans had sociologists, books, and politicians all proclaiming the horrors of what would happen to their society if Jews were allowed to continue running financial and entertainment industries, much less interbreeding with the Aryans. The Japanese, I'm sure, had much the same on how their society would stagnate if they didn't expand beyond their tiny island. The Veit Cong...well, they were [i]communists[/i], nuff said. In other words, yes, the people of the Government were aware of the general principals of "Them and Us are really the same in the end", but they believed they found themselves in an exceptional situation. The Nazi's came the closest to doing away with that principal, but even they did an end run around it- they could not avoid the fact that all humans deserve their mutual respect, right away they declared most of their victims to be sub-human.
Hi Uccisore,
"“It’s time we recognised that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.”
(President Nixon)
On 2 September 1945, nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence from France. “All men are created equal,” he said, “endowed with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
These words were taken directly from the US Declaration of Independence and were a direct appeal to the government in Washington for aid and recognition. Despite Vietnamese refusals of help from both China and the Soviet Union, the US cast Ho Chi Minh as the partner of a Chinese-led communist conspiracy and declared war on Vietnam.
In 1965, US troops landed on China Beach in central Vietnam believing they were repelling a Communist invasion from the North on the freedom-loving people of the South. One of those troops, Robert Muller, who was decorated for bravery, said: “It didn’t take long to have that explode into the myth that it was. Vietnam was a lie. It was a lie from the beginning, throughout the war, and even today as they are trying to write it into the history books.”
“A retreat of the US from Vietnam would be a Communist victory of massive proportions and would lead to World War Three,” claimed Nixon. “If we withdrew from Vietnam, the communists would control Vietnam. Pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and all of South East Asia would be under the control of the communists and the domination of the Chinese,” claimed John F Kennedy. World War Three, of course, never materialised.
Instead, a war-ravaged Vietnam was abandoned to fend for itself. As punishment for their audacity to defeat the United States, they became the victims if a twenty-five year Western embargo. The Vietnamese may have beaten the United States, but Washington still controlled their destiny."
Like I said:
Shalom
Bob, I can’t help but think that what you think you know about me is getting in the way of you reading what I actually write. I didn’t mean to defend the war in Vietnam anymore than I mean to defend Hitler, I talked about them in the same breath and compared them to each other. With that in mind, I don’t see what your response had to do with anything.
Hi Uccisore,
My response has to do with “inside/outside” or “us/them”, not with anything you think I think I know about you …
The point I made in the first post was that we have difficulty connecting because of prejudice and a different perspective of what we in the west call “terrorism” and what those the middle east may call “the struggle”. Failing to connect or disconnecting is often a step that is conciously taken, because we don’t want our perspective questioned.
On coming to Germany, I had all of the prejudices that a young british soldier could be expected to have in the seventies. My lack of education supported those views and despite my natural ability to connect quickly - leaping across language barriers, my prejudices were often my greatest problem. But then again, I was still UK orientated and “who cares!”
When I married my wife and decided to stay in Germany, I had to catch up on my education and went to German schools to do that. It was difficult at first having German as my first language and English as a foreign one, but the most fascinating experience was to have history lesson in Germany. I had assumed that Germans would defend their history in some manner, but the history teacher didn’t. He was quite blunt about Nazi-Germany, but the history of the century that led up to the “Third Reich” was even more interesting.
Having been duly “taught a lesson” and starting to look at English history, I lost much of the prejudice I had grown up with. I even “connected” with French people (a horror to my family in England) and the international society that lived in that somewhat derelict house, whether students or labourers, discussed openly the problems of the world. That is where I learnt to connect and some kind of socialist ideal grew until I became a Christian. But even then, I never quite gave it up.
Having had this experience, I have come to accept people questioning my ideals, my nationality, “my” history - even “my” church history. Of course, I am just as free to do the same, but I can avoid nationalist ideas, or even racist ones at that. That is why at times I have been confronted with Americans or the French, or even Britons, who accused me of attacking them, whilst all along, I am quoting history as I know it.
So don’t worry, I don’t attack you or anything you think I think I know about you, but what you wrote.
Shalom
To all,
There is one piece of understanding that I failed to make explicit even as I hinted around at it. I’ve stated that we need to shed the illusion of us-them. I still believe that. What I failed to say is that seeing us-them as just oneness is an illusion as well. In the pragmatic world of duality, us-them will always exist. I think that is the point that Dunamis and Uccisore are trying to make - that regardless the mind’s projections, those projections are all illusory and I have presented nothing or said nothing.
That said, I like my illusion better than the us-them illusion because it asks for more cooperation and less violence. It is what we make it, and we need to make benevolence a little more likely than malovence.
JT
Hi JT,
I can’t help but think that we are often the victims of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. Of course there is always discrimination in choosing something that we regard as being good. But the positive doesn’t force an active negation of another choice. What I’m saying, is that if you do what you believe in, there is no need to negate the alternatives actively. For example the habit of Christian evangelists to paint their bright picture of Christianity doesn’t really need the dark contrast that these people paint, unless that alternative is viable and you need to paint it black.
Just the same, the Islamic terrorists vision of heaven is ridiculous, when the whole of the west is painted black. Both fall into the trap of polarity, because their cause has reasons for doubt. Anybody using contrasts to describe the world is revealing their own doubt. Anyone using offensive language or taking issues to extremes is doing the same, just like those who repeat “It’s true, isn’t it!” - not as a question but in the manner of an Amen.
That is why a passive “us-them” is of course always going to exist, but it is when people feel they have to act against alternatives that it becomes ugly.
Shalom
How long will life allow a person to be passive? What I mean is, I agree with you so far as you go. But let's say you believe Christianity is the best religion, and you present it that way, but you avoid criticizing other faiths because you feel it would be wrong to do so. Now, what happens when your Christian community that you've worked to build is faced with an incursion of some other faith? Now, as far as I can tell, there are three basis responses to this:
Nothing at all: If you do nothing at all when your creed is challenged, then history forgets about your creed and your stuff goes extinct. Presumably, if you were sincere when you claimed that your stuff was good, then you don't want this.
Be Aggressive: Violence, smear campaigns, other sorts of attacks against the offending belief.
Be Passive-Aggressive: Hold a few more potluck dinners, talk a little louder and more often about how great your faith is, re-paint your Church to make it look snazzy, stuff like that. You still hold to your ideal of not saying anything bad about the 'competition', but the change in your actions is obviously all about beating the other guy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that people and their choices aren't the only things in the world, life won't let you be passive: Sooner or later, there will be 1000 people and only enough space for 500, or someone with the best intentions will do something you believe will bring about disasterous results. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most lone individuals living passive lives only live comfortably if there are other people (Governments and etc.) watching out for them who are not so passive, right? I mean, the land I live on, the things I believe, the stuff I have, only exist as they do because somewhere along the line, somebody (many times wrongly) fought for them.
Hi Uccisore,
What you have missed out (logical fallacy of false dilemma) is to ask why your creed is challenged. Why do people suddenly have an interest in some other religion? Do they like the music better, the speaker, the community, the social behaviour? For any of these reasons the people won’t have grasped your message and you are just loosing the grey area that never had a binding relationship with your community.
If the reasons involve the Spirituality, or the teaching makes more sense, or people are looking for a community that is socially more active towards the needy, then you have problems on your hands. These people are looking for a means to express a heartfelt compassion, or are looking for insight, inspired teaching and authenticity.
In this case it would do no good to do nothing, to regard the whole thing as a competition or to be aggressive. Instead, it would be necessary to turn inward (or to do penance) and seek the living spiritual pulse that has evaded you.
Has somebody really fought for spirituality? The Bible says that those who are concerned more about “the land they live on, the things they believe, and the stuff they have†fail to see that these things all pass, but the Spirit goes on. Every time that Israel lost to their neighbours, the chronics spoke about a spiritual crisis and lack of faith. When the disciples were blinded by the beauty of the Temple of Herod, Jesus reminded them that the Temple of stone would one day be destroyed, but that the temple of the Spirit could be rebuilt in three days.
I think that this is where a great deal has gone wrong within Christianity which has brought us an exclusive and aggressive deportment. The classic idea that “we built this city on …†isn’t really Christian. It is the coalition of stubborn expansion and conservatism. The romantic tales of how the west was won are as wrong as the romantic ideas about the British, Spanish or Portuguese Empires. The real story is a fight for power, not spirituality. And the truly spiritual were very often the victims, not the winners.
Life does allow us to be reflective, meditative and introspective – instead of outwardly reacting, aggressively defending what we believe to be our right. And when someone stands in front of us, threatening our existence, it isn’t a member of some other religion, but someone who his imposing his will upon you, trying to gain power over you. Towards such people Christ has told you how to react.
The funny thing that occurs to me (only funny because it never happened) when Hitler is used as an epitome of hatred and racism, is how would America have reacted, had the language of America been German, and not English? After all, the vote was close. And where would we be today?
Shalom
I didn't exactly miss that as a third option, I was considering it as a previous step; There is such a thing as honest disagreement, where both parties reflect as best they can, are open and honest with all the facts, do the requisite soul-searching, and are still each convinced that the other is wrong and ought to be stopped.
Maybe not under your definition of the term, but at the very least you'd have to admit that many people throughout history have [i]taken themselves[/i] to be fighting for spirituality or spiritual issues. I think it's safe to say that if certain wars didn't go the way they did, I would have never heard of Jesus (providence notwithstanding).
tentative:
If ‘us’ doesn’t understand ‘us’, then reflections on ‘them’ are pointless.
Yet the most skillful negotiator will be the one who can get the guy to put the gun down. And the compromiser may proceed with a guy across the table who’s just stalling to have time to detonate a dirty bomb. Do the circumstances of the negotiation matter or does what the negotiators understand about themselves matter?