What this Blog is About: the Origins of the East-West dichotomy.

1967, France. An Algerian Jewish philosopher publishes Of Grammatology, he first in a series of works that would make him famous for denouncing and upsetting the balance at the basis of Western thought. His name was Jacques Derrida and he would go on to become the father of deconstruction. 

This is a fairly simple theory: the world is organised in sets of hierarchical dichotomies, that is, two opposing ideas, with one placed at the top and the other at the bottom.  For instance, tall-short, thin-fat, knowledgeable-ignorant, etc. Most readers will rapidly identify that one of these items is better than the other. Why be short when you can be tall? That is unless one is playing 'Hide and Seek'.

Though Derrida's initial work was focused on language, deconstruction was rapidly applied to many other fields, particularly to the study of the term 'Other' in contexts of colonialism and imperialism. Derrida argued that a person is not born 'other', but was 'otherized' by the self simply because both don't form part of the same group. This establishes a dichotomic hierarchy where the Us is always above the Them, a hierarchy that has been used to maintain the Them subjugated. It is this simple principle that lays at the basis of Empires. It is thus no surprise that emblematic figures such as the British writer Rudyard Kipling, used the concepts of East and West to symbolize the apex of difference, despite the fact that he himself was born in India:

But how are these ideas formed in our heads? Why is it that, from the first civilizational encounter, humans have a tendency to divide humanity between Us and Them? Well, let us hear from the mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik:

 Ultimately, the East-West opposition is based on the natural misunderstanding that stems from having a different cultural background. Yet this natural occurrence can become incredibly dangerous. Keep your eyes peeled for my journey as I research the ways the East-West dichotomy is used as a tool to instigate hate against other races, sexualities and social classes!