Dividuals

While casually reading this article in NYT, it was full of connections to dividualism where it claims that people are not monolithic individuals, they are rather full of contradictions and hence should be seen as an accumulation of separate parts. I personally like this idea that it’s OK to hold contradictions, which I think makes life richer. It’s also a good feature when a group of people are trying to make decisions.

It turns out that this divided heart concept has deep roots in china, where the detection of “divided hearts” is an extremely important skill when you rule. Even the chinese character “忠” meaning loyalty, is constructed from the parts ‘middle’ and ‘heart’.

The reason this is interesting for me is that somehow, I’ve always associated this individual concept with a western one, which we adopted sometime around the 1860s in Asia, so the chinese ruler negating divided hearts felt new to me at first sight.

Yet if I think about it, asian cultures presuppose an indivisible society. Where there is strong trust embedded in the culture or the system. So I guess it was there the whole time in asian cultures too. Individualism was introduced to break that social structure and say the people are the smallest social unit not institutions.