In 1918 when the British had control over the Palestine, in the name of protecting peace and creating harmony they put a law in order: people of different religions were assigned a specific day of the week to attend the Al-Aqsa mosque. So in each day of the week the mosque was either open only to the Christians, or only to the Muslims, or only to the Jews.
According to a friend, that law was a major step towards tearing apart the fabric of the society, which has been organically evolving over centuries to support the pluralistic co-existence. Even though there might have been accidental conflicts from time to time, conflicts were part of life and a chance for the community to grow in capacity to resolve them with traditional resources, such as the help of the elders.
This story points to a deep colonial function, already at play, maybe even with more subtlety and less visibility, specially in cultures that have been trying to preserve traditional values. The trinity of freedom-rights-equality is being used as a scissor to tear apart traditional fabrics at social and also individual mental-immune-systems. With a logical and humanitarian reasoning nothing seems wrong with those values per se, in fact we can easily be convinced to seat them on the throne of universal values. Yet, as a trinity arising from a specific underlying paradigm (a deeply fragmented image of reality and an ego-centric image of humanity), they carry forward functions which are barely noticed, and their destructive power towards the integrity of traditional and indigenous cultures is immeasurable.
The example from Palestine can help us to see the destructive power of something that comes under the flag of peace-making and civilizing, yet its main function comes from the underlying fragmented paradigm.
This dynamic has a second fold. After the social fabric, the organically evolving relationships between people, communities, generations and neighborhoods are broken, a solution is offered to stitch it all back together again, which is mainly called democracy, but we can also call it institutionalization of society. The above mentioned story of Palestines is helpful to see how this institutionalization replaces the broken organic social fabric. This solution which, just like the trinity of modern values is highly glorified and seated on the throne of universality, replaces the organic processes of community, self-reliance, participation and localization of wisdom with a mechanical and centrally managed process. A process that can be easily manipulated by the top layer of the hierarchy of economical and political power at the level of the state. Basically, people are willingly giving up their sense of ownership and responsibility over the well-being of the social sphere to a group of elite whose main characteristic is knowing how to play with (and in most cases manipulate for self interest) the worldly powers.
While the flag of freedom stays high, dancing in the winds of words and political statements, the society is gently guided into a space of deep control with sophisticated intelligence services, mass media and public relations techniques.
Another aspect of this is at the global level. Democracies are prone to fall under the chains of the group who owns this game at the global scale. Building further on that might fixate our attention on the external side of this reality. The point of this article is to bring light to the paradigm underlying this game, a deeply fragmented image of reality and an ego-centric image of humanity, known as modern world view. Once this world view is established within a people as an evolved way of navigating life, the rest of the process of democratization and “freedom” falls into place like a domino series. The only communities that I have observed to stay immune to this pathology* are the ones formed around a traditional or indigenous value system, guided by wisdom keepers, and some other groups who have given themselves the permission to bring the universality of this value system and the paradigm behind it under serious questioning.
