The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 69
differences between the two political parties whose struggles have
tortured Colombian society for a century. First pointing out that the
physical pressures of war would force you into the fray as a zealous
partisan, he went on:
All is one,
And one is in all.
Into the one goes all,
For everything divides into two;
A single thing is always divided.
To which he added as an afterthought, "When Jesus Christ came, he
said, 'Some of you are with me, and some of you are against me.' But
it's the same thing really, because we all come from God."
A Manichean dimension is there. The world is split into two opposed
and hostile parts—Good against Evil, Liberal against Conservative,
Equality against Inequality. It is a natural law that things
divide into two. Yet, "All is in one, and one is in all." The division
will be transcended by a larger unity. Wholes are destined to become
self-alienated subdivisions. Relationships become sundered into antagonistic
parts. But that is only a moment in a larger and more inclusive
process whereby unity is forged. The meaning of life and the
force that animates the cosmos may be seen as a duel between God
and the devil, the Liberals and the Conservatives, but they are all
merely facets and oblique representations of the underlying truth of
oneness and a common human destiny. "But it's not the rich who
lead us. Here it's poverty. Here, in this region, it's the poverty that
moves people, whether they be Liberal or Conservative, it's the poverty."