I frost heard “One divides into two” in China 1976, when I was told it was a phrase of Mao Tse-tung. Yi Fen Wei Er, 一分为二. Turns out it goes back to Hegelian dialectics, but we'll leave that lie there for now.
I was taken by the phrase thinking it showed Mao’s profundity. That was before I knew more of the old reprobate, paedophile, dictator, mass murderer. His “one divides into two” was not more profound that declaring his tribe and the rest, enemies of the people, anti-revolutionaries.
Still, it is rhe way of the world, isn’t it. As long as we’re not to Manichaean about it, too “good and baddie” too “black and whitey”.
Over the years I’ve divided the world variously into “builders and destroyers”, or “be,ievers and infidels” or “west and east” or “anglosphere and the polyglots” or “Islam and the Judeo- Christian world”. What fun!
And now the latest iteration of “one divides into two”, courtesy Covid: the “Laptop class vs. the Working Class”. Aka the salaried vs. the self-employed. Or the Laptop Class vs. the Rest. “The Rest” being self-employed — people who have to meet a payroll— gig workers, people had to go to work (could not work from home). And the Laptop Class being: government workers, academics, journalists.
What surprised Jing and me early on was the the lack of empathy of the former for the latter. Of the Laptoppers for the Workers. People happy working from home too often demonised those that couldn’t. They didn’t understand that founding a business, running a business, then losing that business by government mandate, was something horrible. Yet Dr Anthony Fauci, king of the Laptop class doesn’t recognise it.
Talking of his announced retirement Fauci said: “no one has been irreparably harmed by the lockdown”. Whaaaa? 600,000 bankrupt companies in the US alone! Mass poverty in SE Asia result of lockdowns. Like the pic above. All this, to Fauci, is “nothing”?
The “Fauci effect”. And “The price of lockdowns”. “How Fauci fooled America”.
