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Saturday, October 1, 2016

Uniformity, Homogenization and Panacea

Though the title is catchy as questioning positive thinking actually what it questions, rightly so, is a puerile attempt at homogenizing thinking and living and claiming such methods as a panacea.

The craze for homogenization and the claim of panacea are the ills that have marred evolution of human excellence to a very great extent.

These two are the result of presumptive psychological fixations.

The former is pushed ahead with various justifications while the later is pushed forth out of some presumptions, mostly ethnocentric pride due to indoctrinated identity based on some ideology predominantly either religious or political.

Nature is variety and variety is natural. Denying and defying reality cannot work always.

Though no one can afford to deny or defy the importance of anything or anyone but at the same time expecting or presuming all to be the same or similar or act similarly is not correct in all contexts though such a behavior is preferable in certain contexts for the convenience of  social cohabitation.

There are no stereotypes in any species, especially human beings.

So, uniformity, homogenization and any single philosophy, application, concept or methodology cannot be applied everywhere and to everyone at all times.

These two sickening tendencies have been in human psyche for a long time with various types of manifestations at different times.

This is one more instance of incurable sick obsession of the western psyche, namely, homogenization.

If we glimpse through the annals of history, we can observe this and the several ways in which this has been carried out:-by indoctrination, by force, by cultural invasions, by wars and so on.

Throughout history it has failed miserably.

Be it the Roman Empire’s greed to spread its tentacles; be it the attempt to homogenize religion which failed with Spanish Inquisition; be it Nazism or Colonialism; all have failed.

Once these attempts at homogenizing cultures, beliefs, political ideologies have failed, now, the West is trying it in Trade and Economy.

As before, it is bound to fail. But what we must learn from history and guard ourselves against is the heavy price that humanity may have to pay for facing and overcoming these attempts emanating from a few individuals charged with fanatical obsession in terms of Religious wars, Nazism, Colonial mind set, labeled economic models like capitalism, communism, label and nurtured political ideologies like left, Right and all these have their destructive manifestations and delimiting aspects.

The impacts of the previous obsession were restricted to specific geographical area as they collapsed before they could successfully spread everywhere.


But new and emerging obsessions of homogenization can become a dangerous mass hysterical obsession or paranoia or putrefy everything.

Most unfortunately this malice pervaded even domains like language.
For example last year there was an attempt to modify French spelling to make it convenient. I wrote this don't worry everything except the title are in English.

On Panacea I had written earlier



Reaction to this article 
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/positive-thinking-myth-498447.html

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