#mental mode

It took me two hours to complete a simple cuboid puzzle yesterday. My 9 year old sister in law took it apart and asked me to put it back together, and it stumped me. I told her not to tell me the answer, and just sat there for two hours trying to figure it out. My inlaws were playing with my kids so I had no parental responsibilities – just me and this cloud of despair. What’s wrong with my…

So some may think or actually will start to witch hunting the ‘bastards’ if they are to shape our future.

But who are the greatest bastards of all?

Let’s say we examine the ways we think, at least what I observe the Western heritage of thinking:

We are taught to classify people and things and people’s views into 2 buckets world only:

L or R;

R or W;

Conservative or Progressive;

Fundamentalist (extremists if you like to interchange these two terms though they are technically not the same all the times) and Liberals

Proletariat and Bourgeoisie (trust me it is not only the Communists think in this way, the way people hate each other as ‘have’ or ‘have not’ in many non-communist countries basically live in this mentality, just we may not always aware of this); and by the way if we carefully examine the hostility between the capitalists and the communists back in 18th century, we would discover the extreme hate and distrust against each group root back an argument of ‘who should have the dominating power to own, run and decide means of production’ verse those ‘who thought they were severely exploited and enslaved’. In 21st century’s word, we called this the have versus have not. We called this vertical and/or horizontal inequality, social justice, etc. In 18th century, people called this ‘capitalists’ against ‘communists’. But people living in 21st century having 18th century mindset will call it ‘enemies’ and ‘us’.

So we have the next bucket’: Enemies or Non-enemies (politically, economically, socially, culturally, ethically, gender all coming from ideologically).

Because we have ‘enemies’ and ‘non-enemies’, we logically create the next big umbrella shielding all aspects of our arenas:

Evil and Good. 

But we never really think of it is up to each person’s own subjective understanding and morality foundation or morality configuration to judge who is/are the evils and the good.

Then consciously and subconsciously, we come to conclude who are the

‘they’ versus ‘us’.

A ‘bastard’ is not ‘us’. Same logic on the ‘they’ side. 

And since we can only classify everyone and everything in this universe into 2 buckets, ‘naturally’ we must choose from one of the buckets. And since things and people in either bucket will call the other bucket bastards, we have no choice but being pushed/forced to a forever epidemic dilemma to choose between bastards.

So who is/are the bastards?

May be the greatest bastard of all kind is this 2 buckets worldview.

An assumption (or assumptions) will set the fate of its outcomes. If those who think our ‘fate’ is to choose between bastards, we should first query the assumption(s). 

Is there only one way to see the world as 2 exclusive buckets? Is it the only way to live by swinging between the two sides of a pendulum? Equally in a monolithic worldview, which of course it influences a lot of people in this world, it tells us this is the ONLY way to interpret the world around us.   

BUT -

have we ever question IS IT REALLY true that there is only ONE way to look at the world?

UNLESS-

we query, we will never sincerely ponder whether there can be some other ways to think and some other ways to look at the world around us.