The Age of Hideology
My __________ is better than yours. Keep your answer in mind and consider that in the few seconds it took you to read the question, approximately 2,000 people around the world d-i-e-d. In the minutes before you came to this page, many of those people knew the end was at hand. Next question: What percent of those people, do you think, in the closing moments of their lives, gave a fuck about ANY of those answers? Yet here we are, spending the days, the years of our lives not only CARING but, when things really get bad, willing to do grievous bodily harm to those who dare think their ___________ is better than ours. We put all sorts of nice names on these dig-in-your-heels kinds of systems of belief: religion, politics, patriotism. And we even have a nice word to lump them all together: ideology. When I set out to write this piece, I had a new word in mind. I had been thinking about the awful excesses of violence we resort to because of religion, politics, and patriotism. My new word was going to be "hypocrite-ology," because I had lately been struck by the gross hypocrisy of committed ideologues. Examples: We Americans gasp in horror at the mindless barbarism of the feuding religionists in southeastern Europe, while we operate the world's largest armament- and munitions-export industry. We Americans are baffled at the intensity of feeling among the Chinese regarding Taiwan, yet we spent about $100 trillion to defend KUWAIT. We American Christians now hold Israel tight to our breast as the divinely promised Holy Land, while only 65 years ago we pretended nothing was happening as the Germans began decimating the Jews. And so on. So I was going to do an essay on "hypocrite-ology," and thus give the world maybe a useful new word. Well. The world is welcome to that word, because while mulling it all over, I came up with one that better encompasses and evokes the unabating animalistic behavior that grows out of our precious beliefs. It's easy to make the word. You take "hideous" and plug it into "ideology" and you get: hideology. So who's a hideologue? That's also easy. Anyone willing and eager to do violence to you because you don't believe the same things. I don't mean those who will resort to violence to defend themselves against violence. I mean those whose entire personality and life is vested in their system of belief, to such an extent that they promote aggressive postures of so-called defense, which lead to such a continuing escalation of tension that violence is inevitable: Gynophobic, homophobic politicians. Heirs to a long tradition, and hideologues, one and all. Who's not? Where, you say, do we find a role model if we want to avoid being hideologues ourselves? THAT is NOT easy, because the world as we know is built on hideology. Still, for starters, there was one man, not that long ago, who "defeated" the greatest military power in the world at the time and gained freedom for his country by means of non-violence (Gandhi and India). Right away we run into another language problem. If we want to speak of an alternative to hideology, English gives us only the negative "non-violence." Perhaps it's time to bring another word into English, this one in fact from India, referring to the pacifist, non-violent stance which Gandhi maintained and taught so successfully: Ahimsa [ah-HEEM-sah]. END
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