Healthy psychological growth is quite likely a function of the degree to which a person, or indeed – a civilisation, can successfully negotiate the persistent presence of irreconcilable absence that difference and logical dissonance invokes. In this sense, (both) neurotic obsession and territorial expansionism represent an orientation towards the world that constitutes, in varying degrees, a failure to reconcile the endemic presence of narrative discontinuity that exists within, as and between individuals and their self-inflected tribal abstractions of identity.
A fear of difference in self (and of the self that Other always and already embodies) is a source of fear and insecurity for which symbolic or actual aggression often represents the simplest solution. In this way – ideologies, mythologies and systems of belief render their antitheses externally such that they may never have to engage them internally.
This is neither true nor false, being simply an interpretation. Manichaean certainties breed as much ambiguity in language (and mind) as they might ever hope to resolve.
Daedelus Kite 