“One of the most fundamental things to be always remembered is that we are living in a hypocrite society.
“Once, a great philosopher was asked: ‘What do you think of civilization?’ The philosopher said, ‘It is a good idea, but somebody has to change the idea into a reality. Civilization has not happened yet. It is a dream of the future.’
“But the people who are in power – politically, religiously, socially – are in power because civilization has not happened. A civilized world, a mature man, needs no nations – all those boundaries are false – needs no religions, because all those theologies are simple fictions. The people who have been for thousands of years in power – the priests, the politicians, the super-rich, they have all the powers to prevent human evolution.
“But the best way to prevent it is to convince man, ‘You are already civilized’, to convince man, ‘You are already a human being. You need not go through a transformation, it is unnecessary.’
“And man’s weakness is that knowing perfectly well there exists no such thing as civilization, there exists no such thing as human sensitivity, still he starts believing in all the lies that the politicians have been speaking, the priests have been preaching, the educationists have been teaching – because it seems simpler to just believe, you don’t have to do anything for it. To recognize the fact that you are not yet a man creates fear. The very ground underneath your feet disappears.
Truth makes you utterly naked – naked of all lies, naked of all hypocrisies. That’s why nobody wants truth; everybody believes that he has got it.
“Do you see the psychological strategy? If you don’t want to give something to someone, convince him, hypnotize him, repeat again and again, ‘You have got it’. And when thousands of people around you – your parents, your teachers, your priests, your leaders – are all believing it, it seems almost impossible for new arrivals in the world, small children, not to be convinced of this thousands-of-years-old idea. Millions of people have lived and died believing that civilization has happened.
“So the first thing I want you to understand is that we are still barbarous. Only barbarians can do things that we have been doing for thousands of years – not human beings. In three thousand years, five thousand wars…and you call man civilized? In the twentieth century – exactly in the middle of the twentieth century – you can produce Adolf Hitler, you can produce Josef Stalin, you can produce Benito Mussolini, you can produce Mao Zedong, and still you believe man is civilized?….
No, you have been deceived and this declaration of human rights by the United Nations is nothing but the same hypocrisy….
“These politicians are articulate, clever, cunning…mostly coming from the legal profession. They are saying there should be no discrimination between man and woman, between black and white. Between races, religions, political ideologies, there should be no discrimination. And who is making the discrimination? These are the same people who are making the declaration.
“They have enslaved the woman for centuries, and they are not yet willing to give her freedom – which, according to their declaration, is a basic human right. The blacks are being treated as animals. Just at the end of the last century, the blacks were still be sold, auctioned in marketplaces like a commodity. And even today, they are not respected as the white people are respected. And these are the white people – all these politicians are white. These white people have been driving the whole of humanity, for three hundred years, into slavery. They all had their empires. England had the biggest empire; it was said that the sun never set in the British Empire. Somewhere or other in the British Empire the sun was shining and it was day – all around the earth. But other white people were not far behind: the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish – they all had vast empires, exploiting the whole earth. They have been the parasites: and it is hilarious that all these parasites are now declaring human rights.
“This is a deception. It is not meant; what they are saying they don’t mean. It is just to give you an idea that you are equal to everybody, you are a brother to everybody, that you have all the human rights.
But I know – all these human rights are just hypocrisies. I know by my own experience.
Excerpted from: Osho, Sermons in Stones, Talk #26 – The Human Right Declaration: Hypocrisy of a Barbarous Society
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