The image, the donkey and the donkey

Man is sensitive, so he can't stand harsh words. You say a donkey jumps uphill, they ride on its back, it lasts all its life and does not run away.

Nice, I said to myself when I read this saying that Azis Nesini said. It exudes irony, at first sight it claims that man is sensitive, in the subtext it says that his skin has become a sole, worse than a donkey's. He jumps up for a word of mouth spoken in an instant, he endures to be stolen and trampled on all his life. He worries about the label, but he doesn't care at all about the vinegar that is being sold to him as wine.

It happens like this, I said to myself, because many people do not kill their minds before, they act with intuition and for the sake of habit and not with logic and reason.

When I delved a little deeper, that is, when I used logic and not prejudice, psychology came to my aid. Quite naturally, I said, the insult 'ass' is perceived instantly and evokes a reactive reaction, while the trampling and exploitation are realized little by little, over months and years. What is experienced instantly evokes strong emotions and reactions, what is experienced over time becomes a habit and begins to seem ordinary.

However, even this explanation did not seem 100% convincing to me, so I was trying to approach the 'man vs donkey' problem on a social-historical level. In traditional societies, where oral language plays a big role and where nami and namuzi are highly valued, labeling and insulting in public must weigh heavily and become a source of quarrels. In modern societies, I continued, real and pragmatic things take more value, no one asks you where you are from, whose son you are, whether you are wearing a suit or jeans, but what you are good at doing for yourself and for others.

The juxtaposition 'suit - jeans' I don't know why it reminded me of Nastradini's anecdote that, when he went to the feast dressed anyway, they didn't hang him, when he came in a silk robe they put him in charge and Nastradini started to 'feed' his bag he told him 'eat meat'. Damn right after that I remembered the principle 'image is everything', a principle that dominates our time and which is as if Nastradini rose from the grave and said: sorry, the image is everything.

As the historical social approach was confusing me badly and removing the cloned boundaries between traditional and modern and especially the sacred boundaries between Occidental and Oriental, I returned to old a simpler thing: the donkey is a noble animal, a worker like him, without pretensions to saddle, bridle, yzengji and tagji fisme, even with a lot of intellect. When it has all these merits, why do we use it to insult and humiliate the other?

And even further: when we cannot recognize and appreciate a simple and concrete thing like a donkey, think of what we tarnish when we judge the Oriental and the Occidental, the modern and the traditional, the rational and the intuitive and other things that can hardly be enter the narrow drawers of our prejudices.