terça-feira, 17 de outubro de 2006

Ohran Pamuk: Neighbours

Let's love our neighbour, let's love Greece, Iran, Syria. Let's enter the EU and live in peace. But let's not abandon our own thoughts, our own identity, our own personality just because we're worried about "what the neighbours would say", just because we should be getting along well with our neighbours.

1 comentário:

Anónimo disse...

Accepting ourselves first:

Yes, we need to love our neighbours without abandoning our own identity. This is true if we compare it with the Systems theory (Bertalanffy) that says an open system ("we") need diversity ("neighbours") to ensure balance and flexibility and avoid entropy but, on the other hand, should preserve a certain degree of closeness to ensure the integrity of that system identity.
I believe the solution and the path to follow is to learn how to accept ourselves first (to understand and recognise our own identity). This is the idea of the Egyptian thinker Milad Hanna who said (in his book "Acceptance of the other") for a human being to fully accept the other, must accept himself first.
This is applied to the self but can also be applied to a group of people, cities, nations or continents. Rather than living the "clash of civilisations" we are living the challenge of accepting and nurturing diversity.
At a global scale it is, then, important to look back to the ancient focus of human civilisations (Africa, India and China) and re-discover models of acceptance, like in Egypt between Islam and Christianity.