On Manichean Perception

Manichean theory or perception of the world started with a Persian by the name Manes/Mani - who founded an ancient religion espousing a doctrine of a struggle between good and evil. Manichean has an over-simplified view of the world – everything is reduced to a dualistic view of the world, dividing things into good or evil, light or dark, black or white, entertaining no middle or in between states, no shades of gray.

Just by taking time to blog about this, you may be wondering about my infatuation on this old religion, which at first glance seemed even not logical in these day and age. For that matter, the last time I heard an important person, a person with world changing power at that, with this kind of view was some ten years ago when the then American president George W Bush said to the world – ‘You are either with us or against us’ - during the first days of war against terrorism after the sad days of September 11, 2001.

Even though very sublime, this perception is making a comeback and really out for anyone to see. Again, I started seeing people involved in American politics, needless to mention the party’s name, espousing the same kind of approach to their view of American ills and the way to get out of the current predicaments. I started really being afraid of this kind of perception and started seeing the impact it may have on people.

I am running into the danger of oversimplifying the issue but here are the obvious sign that I see on people with such perception:

• Thinking in between such as the good or bad is painful so people jump to make conclusion on one side. This thinking will make people lazy – forcing them not to think. It is easy to pick one side without spending time to analyze if there is another way.
• For some people, it will compensate for the lack of morality or help them to appear morally high by siding on one aspect that looks ‘good’ to them.
• People will make something look bad just because they want to make their side look good. They do not recognize any good point to be accepted on the other side – this is nihilistic by nature.
• Add on top of this lack of basic humanity or civilization, a simple difference between people will lead to killings or war that is difficult to understand by reasoned people.

Manichean perception is proved to make people myopic and narrow minded. People with small set of yardstick to measure the world will be disruptive to progress and menace to society. When encountered with a tough situation, these people resort back to their yardsticks to see problems. Our world is changing fast – there is a tremendous amount of knowledge in the digital world that people are using now. A lot of people have a superb communication mechanism at their fingertips. With all this advancement, our world is becoming complex – the digital advance will continue to challenge us with its diversity of knowledge coming from all sides of the world. This advancement is unacceptable to Manicheans. Manichean perception should not have a place in this era – it should be dead; dead with old time that we do not want to remember.