Terry Pratchett's Discworld witches have been mentioned in several articles. There are many Discworld novels in which the witches don't appear; I have yet to read quite a few of them.
I decided to investigate Jingo, and I saw this:
“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
This reminded me of one of Rudyard Kipling's poems. Here is the opening verse of We and They, which was first published in Debits and Credits (1926):
Father, Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say,
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
And They live over the sea,
While We live over the way,
But - would you believe it?
-They look upon We
As only a sort of They!
...
I wonder if Terry Pratchett was inspired by Kipling's poem.
These words may be seen as a kind of 'othering' based on distance and cultural differences. Some people do think in terms of insiders and outsiders; they project their negative qualities onto the latter group, and they look for pretexts to criticise, judge, condemn, dehumanise and sometimes even justify persecuting and destroying anyone they consider to be 'not one of us'. And the other side often does exactly the same!
A more positive interpretation is that these words are a sign of a developmental step or two in the right direction. They could be an indication that someone has gained objectivity and learned to put their lives into the context of the total picture.
The words could be a sign that someone has realised that the world doesn't revolve around them: they are just one human being among many. They may have learned to put themselves in other peoples' places and see things from different viewpoints and an enhanced perspective.
Either way, these extracts from Jingo and Kipling's poem are very thought-provoking. .
