(flip flip book-o-mancy from A New Earth still)...
"On a collective level, the mind-set, "We are right and they are wrong," is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is a long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that other perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative," but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the 'other' as evil,' and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perception and retribution, action and reaction.
Here it becomes obvious that the human ego is collective aspect is "us" against "them" in even more insane than the "me," the individual ego, although the mechanisms is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego."
