Published: June 2025 (4 months ago) in issue Nº 431-32
Keywords: Values of Auroville, Psychology, Sociology, Conflicts, Communication, Prejudice, Empathy and Human unity
References: Michael Sandel and Hannah Arendt
The danger of depersonalisation
This tendency is seen in the increasing ‘commodification’ of human beings, of them being viewed simply as sources of profit. One example of this is seen in big tech companies sweeping up human data to enable more effective marketing. People are depersonalised when they are only represented by data, and depersonalisation makes it easier for those in powerful positions to exploit and manipulate them without moral scruples.
Auroville seems to be a very long way from being such a market-oriented, exploitative society. The ideal held before us is the transformation of consciousness, not the maximisation of personal or collective profit. And what I’ve always found most refreshing about this place is the fact that here people are appreciated on the basis of who they are and the values which they hold rather than on their wealth, status or education.
I wonder, however, to what extent the conflict of the past three years has begun to change this. For what often happens in polarised conflicts is also a form of depersonalisation. This is because when people strongly disagree, they tend to stop interacting with each other. As a result, they lose the cross-cutting ties which allow them to disagree on one thing and agree on something else, and so lose the sense of the other as a whole, complex person.
This often leads to them characterising those from the other party in simplistic, one-dimensional terms: ‘dogmatics’, ‘extremists’, ‘eco-terrorists’, ‘city-blockers’, etc. And this depersonalisation, along with the belief that the other party represents some kind of existential threat to Auroville, allows them to say things about them, and to do things to them, which they would never consider doing if they were still on speaking terms and relating to them as real people.
This tendency becomes even more dangerous when there is a religious or spiritual dimension. For when people are convinced that they hold the spiritual truth and that others are acting in a way that is threatening that truth, it allows them great latitude in causing harm, which is why religious persecution is the most horrible form of all.
I’m not suggesting that we have any homegrown Inquisitors who would willingly burn heretical Aurovilians at the stake. But there is a danger that those who fervently believe, for example, that Mother herself had formulated the Master Plan (as was stated recently in a Governing Board meeting) may justify using anything and anyone in their efforts to materialise it.
However, depersonalising and misusing people to achieve a spiritual end is surely deeply contradictory.
Let us by all means disagree, but not to the extent that we abandon our sense of our common humanity. For, as Hannah Arendt put it, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Empathy does not mean that one necessarily agrees with another’s stance: we are still called upon to discriminate. Empathy means that even if one believes that somebody else is embodying a destructive force which must be resisted, one never abandons one’s humanity by descending to hatred and one never ceases to relate to them as human beings. For one understands that none of us is immune to being used by the immense forces which cluster around a world-changing project like Auroville.