Divide a nation into parties, or set your enemies at loggerheads, and you can have your own way. A maxim of Machiavelli.
B. STEVENSON Home Bk. Proverbs (1959) 1014/1 ‘Divide et impera’..was the motto of Philip of Macedon and of Louis XI of France, in dealing with his nobles. It was the traditional motto of Austria. Polybius, Bossuet, and Montesquieu used it, but it is generally ascribed to Machiavelli
Or Divide et Impera, divide and rule in latin, is a method of ‘gaining and maintaining power’ that has been used for millennia. The quick research i did on the its history did not reveal the source of the term/method. Division exists naturally.
The effectiveness of the divide and conquer model is evident throughout history. The term exists on the physical plane, tribes fighting tribes, etc… Imperialists taking over a land, drawing arbitrary boundaries which encourage the people there to fight amongst themselves instead of against their imperialist oppressors. Divide the people so they can’t join together and overthrow the powers that control them. The examples go on and on. I wanted to point out another field in which this practice has exerted it’s force.
One could say that the kingdom of our consciousness was once unified. Perhaps this was before the fall. Maybe you think it never was. However, a glance at the history of human thought and religion and science and we see the divide and conquer principle at work there. Indeed, it is inherent to human beings to divide and rule/conquer. That is how we break down what our senses receive in order that we do not get overwhelmed by the overwhelming impression coming at us from all directions at all time. Anyone who has been under the influence of a powerful psychedelic has experienced the wondrous, sometimes terrifying onslaught of stimuli that floods the being when the filters have been removed. The fact that our consciousness is filtering information at all times, that it is breaking down the data into pieces we can more easily digest is a well supported, though mechanistic, view of the way we relate and operate in the world.
Some of the great discoveries of science have been based on division. Calculus made it possible to divide things into quantities previously unrealized by mathematics, infinitesimals. Indeed, science is the history of division, of taking things apart, seeing what they are made of… The latin word for pebbles is calculus. Also, in language, the written word, the sounds we speak, all of this is possible through the dividing of symbols or sounds into parts in order for us to use them. The history of division.
Every human is born from an addition and a division. A coming together and a dividing. But the dividing creates a unified form. The splitting of atoms is one of, if not the, most dramatic examples of the destructive force of division. Division, isolated from it’s partner addition, is quite destructive.
What I am writing about is the division of our vision. The etymology of the word division, divide, devise, tells an interesting story: (from the O.E.D.)
[a. OF. devise-r to divide, etc. = Pr. and OSp. devisar, It. divisare:late pop.L. *dvsre, freq. of dividre to DIVIDE, which by dissimilation became devisare in Romanic. The sense-development was far advanced before the word was taken into English; OF. had the senses, ‘to divide, distribute, dispose in portions, arrange, array, dispose of, digest, order, form a plan or design, invent, contrive, express or make known one's plan or will’, whence in later use, ‘to confer, discourse, commune, talk, chat’, the last the chief sense in modern French. It. divisare has in Florio, 1611, the senses ‘to deuise, to invent; also, to deuide or part a sunder; to discource, to talke or confer together; to blazon armes; also, to surmise, to thinke, to seeme vnto’.]
Perhaps we could rewrite Machiavelli’s maxim and say, “Divide reality, the world of the senses into parts, and you can have your own way.” Did the early monotheists look at the polytheistic belief systems as some of us today look at science? Was polytheism a way to control the people? Where does division as a means to describe the facets of something become a method of reducing the inherent power of things? How conscious are the proponents of these systems to their effects on the collective consciousness of the people? The olympians of science have sought to find a unifying principle, an equation that will sum it ALL up. Sum it up, put all that we have divided back together again. The humpty-dumpty of world. It occurred to me that the divisive quality of science did not come from it’s great minds, just as the divisive elements of Christianity did not come from its founder. The monism of a science that divides, reduces to our infinitesimals is as powerfully controlling on a psychic/psychological level as is a politics that divides is on a socio-political, cultural level.
This division and unity is one of the great paradoxes of existence. Don’t let it break you down.
It’s as if we have to continue dividing until we are one and realize we are one together.
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