These words come from Japanese and roughly translate to real truth and appearance of things. When we look at a Jaguar or Cougar We have a dilemma because there are two competing truths even before we can confer meaning on these elemental and powerful forces. The astute reader has already used the capitalization of the terms to confer the meaning that we are indeed talking about trade names of products rather than the members of the cat family. Truth exists independent of our ability or willingness to look for it. Occasionally, even before we have language to describe it. On one level we can say that looking at Jaguar, Cougar, Ferrari or Formula one vehicles at one end of the spectrum or a Volkswagen, Opel or Iceta, truth is, they are all vehicles that use an internal combustion engine to move people about the earth. These vehicles could be argued to be different, but the real truth is that they all use fuel to move people. More or less elegantly, or at what efficiency rate would be largely dependent on point of view. The person who drives a car for the expressed purpose of going the fastest, or to experience G-force will have to be willing to sacrifice fuel economy and the person holding the belief that a penny saved is a penny earned will see a different route to beauty and perhaps even perceive the truth in an altered way, justifiably ignoring design flaws in their conceptualization of their perception of the real truth.
If you think that this is confusing, consider the Honne, we are all human beings. Even at that most base reality, immediately we run into trouble as Tatemae clouds our thought. Child molesters? Certainly not humane and the "being" part comes immediately conflicted as well because we may perceive these "subhumans as in a perpetual state of stalking and arousal at the very sight of children. This actually may be so, but it matters not. Our Tatemae requires us to deny heinous actors the same status as the rest of us. My own perception has led me to a variety of appearances that I created to mediate between what is actually surrounding me and what I let in to me consciousness. Frequently this mediation between Honne and Tatemae has become rote, takes place virtually unnoticed by our organism and if pointed out to us can seem like an assault.
The truth, or more specifically the real truth cannot be mediated, cannot be argued about, cannot be defended, cannot be supported by a single lie or justification. It stands alone. Having written about this before, please forgive my preoccupation with it, but perhaps another angle will help to flesh it out. Brandeis stated that "light has the power to sterilize." When we look deeply into the real truth of any matter, it brings light to the mysteries and vagaries of the transient Tatemae (the illusion of things) How many times have we heard from science, "Upon closer inspection..."? How many times do we need to hear from economists, or politicians, social scientists or historians, "Uh...what we meant was..."? The whole bloody thing is based on lies. Without keeping up appearances we would have to admit that there is far more profane than sacred and when we supplant one for the other, problems ensue.
Many of the most terrible actors are, in the realm of Tatemae, above reproach because they have linked their status to "the divine". The inhumane wife abuser, child abuser, exploiter of labor, all of these have specific documents that they can turn to that give them authority to do so. Whether a caliph, or pastor, guru or shaman endorses an action cannot change the fact of what it is. Oppression, exploitation, abuse and neglect are the same, no matter what you use to defend them. Inhumanity toward our fellow human beings is diametrically opposed to how we define the term humanity. The real truth is that we are all equal, all "children of the lord and lady", stardust, as some like to call us. We are the one and only chance to recreate Eden on the face of the planet. Whatever vile and heinous acts we choose to perpetrate on others, or the planet is our own business, but only if we confuse the fact that there is a difference between real truth and the appearance of things. When we start to believe, or believe in, the transient appearances the road to ruin has been paved.
Better we take a hard look into this now than continue to base our beliefs and actions on the sands of time, because the foundational principles that have helped prop up the lies of the past are shifting like the sands in an hourglass. Speaking of sand and I have written on this at some length in the past as well, Take the Arab World. I am sorry to use a potentially pejorative term here, but what many in the world see as just a region of shifting sand and alliances, dotted with oasis and mega cities too young to have any patina of poverty. Rural areas seem to the outside world to appear as decrepit stops along the spice road of a forgotten century.
This view is like calling the event that Vietnam knows as the War with America (which in fact, and in their schools, they teach that they won). After all, they speak Vietnamese, not American, the Vietnam war. The tatemae which has been cultivated in the U.S. has been that the tiny strip of land turned out to be "not worth our time and money any more. Hey, they make great trading partners and we can be much better off with them as friends than foe." Quite the about face for a culture whose watch word when I was a child was: "Bomb them back into the stone age!" Truth probably lies closer to, they love their children as much as we love ours, but many will never give that territory back to the people of Vietnam.
Back to the "Middle East", another misnomer...perhaps "cradle of civilization" for any anthropologists out there...Historians love to gloss over the fact that way back in WWI, the "war to end all wars", warlords who had no alliances could be bargained into the fight, to help us defeat the Kaiser, but that they would need an incentive to do so. The eventual victors promised self determination and autonomy, "statehood" as we called it. However, the self determination and autonomy was not granted freely, it came with a hidden price dealt after the agreements were made and the Kaiser had been defeated. The bargain had not been for self determination after all because those who drew the lines on the map knew in advance which factions and tribes were forever going to be at odds with one another and to guarantee that no state would, in-fact, overwhelm the others they created "States" of perpetual conflict that lacked any sense of meaning for people on the ground. A grave, and very real truth is that the arbitrary lines drawn to separate Syria from Jordan or Jordan from Iraq were subjected upon the people, much like natives from the desert southwest of the United states are now confronted with border jumping within their own homeland, perpetrated on them by virtue of a seemingly arbitrary mark across a map.
Imagine, for a moment, that someone had dominion over "our land", the United States of America and said, "We will give you freedom and autonomy, but these are the parameters you must live by from now on..." Then they proceeded to carve up our boundaries so that California would extend eastward to the Mississippi River, subsuming Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Utah, the bottom 1/4 of Wyoming, Kansas and the southern third of Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas. Then lets say they carved out "Texas" and gave it the status of another country. Similarly, north of that, except the Great Lakes Region was considered another country and the entire South and East were made into a fourth country, Except Florida which would be an administrative unit of Cuba. You think we would have some angst over that? Do you think that one hundred years in the future, or five hundred years hence, they would forget the brutality of the carving up of our civilization? Heck, there are those in the South who still believe that the war between the states is not over.
Basing our world view on tatemae will always cripple our chances of making better choices, understanding the true nature of the world around us and it will certainly doom our children to have less stability, insight and power over their own lives. The vagaries of perception always create hollow illusions of truth. Believing in our lies, no matter how exquisitely crafted can only lead to estrangement and dislocation.
If you think that this is confusing, consider the Honne, we are all human beings. Even at that most base reality, immediately we run into trouble as Tatemae clouds our thought. Child molesters? Certainly not humane and the "being" part comes immediately conflicted as well because we may perceive these "subhumans as in a perpetual state of stalking and arousal at the very sight of children. This actually may be so, but it matters not. Our Tatemae requires us to deny heinous actors the same status as the rest of us. My own perception has led me to a variety of appearances that I created to mediate between what is actually surrounding me and what I let in to me consciousness. Frequently this mediation between Honne and Tatemae has become rote, takes place virtually unnoticed by our organism and if pointed out to us can seem like an assault.
The truth, or more specifically the real truth cannot be mediated, cannot be argued about, cannot be defended, cannot be supported by a single lie or justification. It stands alone. Having written about this before, please forgive my preoccupation with it, but perhaps another angle will help to flesh it out. Brandeis stated that "light has the power to sterilize." When we look deeply into the real truth of any matter, it brings light to the mysteries and vagaries of the transient Tatemae (the illusion of things) How many times have we heard from science, "Upon closer inspection..."? How many times do we need to hear from economists, or politicians, social scientists or historians, "Uh...what we meant was..."? The whole bloody thing is based on lies. Without keeping up appearances we would have to admit that there is far more profane than sacred and when we supplant one for the other, problems ensue.
Many of the most terrible actors are, in the realm of Tatemae, above reproach because they have linked their status to "the divine". The inhumane wife abuser, child abuser, exploiter of labor, all of these have specific documents that they can turn to that give them authority to do so. Whether a caliph, or pastor, guru or shaman endorses an action cannot change the fact of what it is. Oppression, exploitation, abuse and neglect are the same, no matter what you use to defend them. Inhumanity toward our fellow human beings is diametrically opposed to how we define the term humanity. The real truth is that we are all equal, all "children of the lord and lady", stardust, as some like to call us. We are the one and only chance to recreate Eden on the face of the planet. Whatever vile and heinous acts we choose to perpetrate on others, or the planet is our own business, but only if we confuse the fact that there is a difference between real truth and the appearance of things. When we start to believe, or believe in, the transient appearances the road to ruin has been paved.
Better we take a hard look into this now than continue to base our beliefs and actions on the sands of time, because the foundational principles that have helped prop up the lies of the past are shifting like the sands in an hourglass. Speaking of sand and I have written on this at some length in the past as well, Take the Arab World. I am sorry to use a potentially pejorative term here, but what many in the world see as just a region of shifting sand and alliances, dotted with oasis and mega cities too young to have any patina of poverty. Rural areas seem to the outside world to appear as decrepit stops along the spice road of a forgotten century.
This view is like calling the event that Vietnam knows as the War with America (which in fact, and in their schools, they teach that they won). After all, they speak Vietnamese, not American, the Vietnam war. The tatemae which has been cultivated in the U.S. has been that the tiny strip of land turned out to be "not worth our time and money any more. Hey, they make great trading partners and we can be much better off with them as friends than foe." Quite the about face for a culture whose watch word when I was a child was: "Bomb them back into the stone age!" Truth probably lies closer to, they love their children as much as we love ours, but many will never give that territory back to the people of Vietnam.
Back to the "Middle East", another misnomer...perhaps "cradle of civilization" for any anthropologists out there...Historians love to gloss over the fact that way back in WWI, the "war to end all wars", warlords who had no alliances could be bargained into the fight, to help us defeat the Kaiser, but that they would need an incentive to do so. The eventual victors promised self determination and autonomy, "statehood" as we called it. However, the self determination and autonomy was not granted freely, it came with a hidden price dealt after the agreements were made and the Kaiser had been defeated. The bargain had not been for self determination after all because those who drew the lines on the map knew in advance which factions and tribes were forever going to be at odds with one another and to guarantee that no state would, in-fact, overwhelm the others they created "States" of perpetual conflict that lacked any sense of meaning for people on the ground. A grave, and very real truth is that the arbitrary lines drawn to separate Syria from Jordan or Jordan from Iraq were subjected upon the people, much like natives from the desert southwest of the United states are now confronted with border jumping within their own homeland, perpetrated on them by virtue of a seemingly arbitrary mark across a map.
Imagine, for a moment, that someone had dominion over "our land", the United States of America and said, "We will give you freedom and autonomy, but these are the parameters you must live by from now on..." Then they proceeded to carve up our boundaries so that California would extend eastward to the Mississippi River, subsuming Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Utah, the bottom 1/4 of Wyoming, Kansas and the southern third of Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas. Then lets say they carved out "Texas" and gave it the status of another country. Similarly, north of that, except the Great Lakes Region was considered another country and the entire South and East were made into a fourth country, Except Florida which would be an administrative unit of Cuba. You think we would have some angst over that? Do you think that one hundred years in the future, or five hundred years hence, they would forget the brutality of the carving up of our civilization? Heck, there are those in the South who still believe that the war between the states is not over.
Basing our world view on tatemae will always cripple our chances of making better choices, understanding the true nature of the world around us and it will certainly doom our children to have less stability, insight and power over their own lives. The vagaries of perception always create hollow illusions of truth. Believing in our lies, no matter how exquisitely crafted can only lead to estrangement and dislocation.
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