Spot the difference!

Marketing strategists say ‘Be different! Be unique!’. But from wanting to be too visibly different, you can become your own enemy.

‘And you, who is your enemy?’

Are real enemies not so much those which menace us directly, but those which certain people have an interest in framing as ‘the enemy’, even if they are not really enemies? It is not their menacing aspect which makes their difference evident, but the way in which they are different. The ‘enemy’ appears above all as ‘different’ to us, and follows customs and traditions which are not our own.

Quotation:

‘A few years ago, in New York, I stumbled upon a taxi driver with a name difficult to decipher, and he explained to me that he was Pakistani. He asked me where I came from, so I replied I was from Italy, and he was surprised to hear that our population was so small, and that our language was not English.

Finally, he asked me who our enemies were. Sensing my incomprehension, he explained to me that he wanted to know which peoples we were at war with over the past centuries, for territorial reasons, for ethnic conflicts, for constant border violations, etc. I told him we were at war with no-one. Patiently, he explained to me that he wanted to know who our historical enemies were, those we used to massacre. I repeated to him that we did not have any, that the last war Italy waged was over half a century ago, and besides, that we started it with one enemy and finished it with another.’ 

Source: Umberto Eco, ‘Inventing the enemy’, pub. Vintage 2013

  Photo : © Nicolas Rousseaux