Divide and rule operates within our minds, as our choice

'Divide and rule' operates in our minds, under our noses such that we choose to limit ourselves, become hostage or victim to circumstance and then express powerlessness in destructive ways. This point was brought out when

vardarac said:

Everyone, innocent and guilty, rich and poor, everyman and politician, is lumped together under the tribe of "West" or "East", "Right" or "Left." Hate and violence will come to those who never had any real control over the circumstances.

I see this, at present, as the biggest problem with humanity - We like to simplify our enemies into groups that include wide swaths of people that have nothing whatever to do with our grievances.

My comment:

Personalizing an issue invokes a primitive reaction that shuts down communication in fight or flight modes on one level or another. So to become free of this 'love to hate' mentality, we have to be willing to take a step back from opinion, identity and reaction and identify the mentality at work in ourselves.

It could be said that the most cunning, work behind the scenes to set up and work both sides of every conflict. The personalized reactions merely programmed thereby. If one can see it in others - then one can start recognizing it in one's self.

This of course is not the direction that self-righteousness wants to take.

The conceptual control mentality is so normal to most of our living that we do not recognize we are enslaved - nor that beneath the such a mentality, we are making choices that 'give our power away' and identify with victimhood and limitation as a means to get something we believe we want.

The breakdown of such consciousness is part of waking up - because it becomes intolerable and impossible to maintain such 'unconsciousness' of one's actual consciousness. So realignment is inevitable. The way in which we experience life in all its changes, is fundamentally determined by our self-definition. Using the 'evil' out there to define a relative 'good' in here, is a primitive denial and displacement mechanism. This has to yield or give way to a self-honesty.

If one plays mind-games without integrity and believes them, there is no foundation, and sanity is at cost of truth instead of its embodiment in your unique presence.