Political Discourse - Ashis Nandy

"Third word societies usually maintain within their borders exactly the same violence, exploitative, ethnocidal systems which they confront in the larger world; the same centre and periphery, the same myth that the sacrifices made by people in the short run will lead to the beatitude of development and scientific advancement in the long run, the same story of over-consuming elites fattening themselves to early deaths at the centre and starvation, victimhood and slow death at the periphery. Because of this, the demands of the Third World for more equitous or just terms in North-South exchanges often sound dishonest or hollow. I believe that many traditional as well as modern systems of psychology allow us to extend the argument to the level of the individual. In other words they allow us to claim (a) that we model our interventions in the world on our interventions in our own selves, and (b) that the world does to us what we do to ourselves. This is the reverse of what I have called elsewhere the principle of isomorphic oppression, according to which each level of an integrated social structure neatly reproduces within it the oppressive dynamics of the whole. The principle of isomorphism says: what you do to others you ultimately do to yourself, for "the wages of sin is the kind of person you are'. When reversed, the principle becomes; what you do to yourself or to your kind you cannot but invite others to do the same to you, and to your kind.

It should be obvious that this way of looking at social intervention and culpability dissolves the crude dichotomy between the study of the elites and the study of the masses or, for that matter, between elitism and mass line.

Following traditional wisdom, I like to believe that the story of the prince can never be told without telling the story of the pauper and that the cause of the pauper can never be independent of the cause of the prince.

...the task of the person living a life of the mind is to make greater demands on those who mouth the certitudes of their times and are closer to the powerful and the rich, than on the faiths and ideas of the powerless and the marginalized." ---Excerpt from Political Discourse by Ashis Nandy.

Note: This excerpt comes from written notes that I took many years ago. "Political Discourse" was actually a chapter by Ashis Nandy within a collection of essays by various authors. I neglected to make a note of the text. Perhaps you are familiar with it and can remind me.

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"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare