Dominating Cultures are not Logical

 

Dominating cultures tend to freely appropriate ideas and traditions of the cultures that they dominate.  They just add the gods of the people they have conquered to their already-existing pantheon - even when the mythologies clash and are logically incompatible, dominating cultures shrug.  Thus, for instance, Genghis Khan's descendants were happy to adopt the cultures they dominated.  The Yuan Dynasty took on Chinese customs and beliefs, Berke Khan became a Muslim, and so on - without hesitation.  Often they believed great swirling mixtures of Tengrism, Buddhism, astrology, Christianity, and anything else they came across, all at once, without feeling any cognitive dissonance.  There is always something sweetly naive about conquerors.

Dominated cultures, on the other hand, seethe with resentment and hatred.  They remember every infraction and count every penny they've been cheated.  Not only hatred towards those who have dominated them - not even primarily them.  They also hate the other cultures that have been dominated, and they hate themselves for being dominated.  They even hate themselves for hating themselves, and attempt, often quite successfully, to subdue and silence all their hatred, to swallow and smile. Nonetheless, out of this intense passion arises a desire for purity, and this passion for purity, this disgust for impurity, multiplicity, duplicity, ambivalence, complex and multivalent motivations, deception, and superstition, is what gave rise to the passion for logic.  Even today, fundamentally defeated people often have a passion for straining at gnats.  Often, this very characteristic helps keep them subjugated: it prevents them from uniting with others to topple their oppressors.

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