Belonging to the unchosen People

To think is political. It arises out of a shackles of anxieties, fears and hauntologies that one experiences while facing the changing of the present. It is courage of freedom. It takes courage to think political in freedom. Such courage to think the political in freedom has emancipative freedoms as its goal and not mere unity of all. This is unity that embraces the freedoms of all. It takes courage to be free. Often we are less ideologically driven than enslaved by its inherent logicality. Hanah Arendt teaches the inherent logicality becomes central to totalitarian regimes. Inherent logicality operates like a deductive syllogism. The premise that is assumed is: there are certain races of people who by a supposed law of nature are unfit to live. Therefore, it follows that these races must be eliminatated. The logicality of such thinking becomes logically consistent with murderous acts against those who are deemed to have no right to live. This is why violence is not mindless but has its rationale. It makes evil banal and look ordinary. It makes us believe that we are the chosen people and others that remain outside the ambit of these chosen people have no right to inhabit the earth. We do not want to cohabit with these unchosen people and hence can readily collaborate with those that seek to eliminate them. But the question is do we have the right to choose who should cohabit the earth?

Having neither chosen our birth nor the earth to live, shows that everyone belongs to the unchosen people. Perhaps this fact of being thrown into the world fundamentally marks the unchosen character of our cohabitation of the earth. This is why we cannot have right to decide who will cohabit the earth with us. Unfortunately, the logicality of the ideology of totalitarianism afflicts us and we assume that we have the right to choose with whom to dwell this earth. Such an assumption may desensitize our mind and we may become silent or active collaborators of those who attempt to eliminate the people that they deem to be unchosen and therefore cannot cohabit with them. This is why today it is difficult to belong to the unchosen people. All majoritarian politics is a politics of the chosen people that tries to suppress and even eliminate those that they consider as unchosen people. The unchosen people are the crucified people in a society. They include the migrants, outcastes, women, tribals, etc. The unchosen people are marginalised and are allowed little or no share in the common world. The common world is the world that lies between humans. Often this common world is walled by systems, institutions and practices of exclusion that keeps the unchosen people away. It takes courage to see how we relegate some people to the status of being unchosen people. It takes both courage and freedom to choose to belong to the unchosen people. To belong to the unchosen people, we have to gather courage and say no to all forms of totalitarian ideologies and their logicalities that render the unchosen economically burdensome and socially superfluous and therefore treat them as disposable.

Cohabition is not a choice but a condition of political life, says Hanah Arendt. We can think outside the narrative of the chosen people which are basically narratives of lockdown. But most often we get locked into these closed narratives of the chosen people and subscribe to the logicalities of totalitarian ideologies. These ideologies and the narratives that house them interpellate us into being and we uncritically submit their logicalities that make us either tacit or active agents of the annihilation of those that are deemed as unchosen people. Although it is not easy we have to remain attuned to the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation of our planet earth. This choice has to be critically exercised today more than before since fascism has returned and is fast become acceptable as natural almost globally. The migrant, the religious minority, the tribal etc., have become the unchosen people. We are indeed living in dark times. Things are not bright in our country as well as Goa. We can trace how we are enslaved by the logicalities of the ideologies of the statelessness. We can clearly see how we can identify the unchosen people. Our Muslim brethren along with other minorities, Dalit, tribals and women are certainly the unchosen people in our country. In Goa we can find a deep seated hate of the migrants that seems to be milked to politically counter dissatisfaction with reigning political establishment in our days.

This is why we have the imperative to make a choice in favour of the unchosen people. We do not have right to choose whom to allow to live and whom to disallow. We do have a choice over cobahitation of the earth. Cohabitation becomes a condition of political life and it can get the best and the worst out of us. We already saw how totalitarian politics has ruined the lives as well as taken away innocent lives across the world. Somehow this genocidal thinking is becoming more and more popular today and its evil cannot be clearly discerned as such thinking is married to ideologies of nationalisms with cultural and religious shades. Evil in this garb has become banal and a way of life. Hence, we have the challenge to unthink genocidal thinking and embrace inclusive and life affirm thinking that accepts the freedoms of all. Standing up for the unchosen people is the need of the hour. It takes courage to choose this freedom for all. This choice of the unchosen people is political. But it seems to be the best choice that is facing us today. We will have to make a rebellious choice to overcome the banality of evil. We cannot abandon the unchosen people. By belonging to the unchosen people we can live the unchosen character of our habitation of the earth. The politics of cohabitation has to be saved from degenerating into totalitarianism that usurps the right to chose with whom to cohabit the earth.

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GREETINGS

Attention is a generous gift we can give others.

Attention is love.

- Fr Victor Ferrao