Reactionaries vs. Revolutionaries — How Could Humanity Have Gotten It So Wrong?

OSHO International
10 min readMay 29, 2024
Reactionaries vs. Revolutionaries — How Could Humanity Have Gotten It So Wrong?

Osho,
Revolutionaries have always claimed that it is society’s repressive instruments of control that deform humanity and produce the ugly behavior of man.
The reactionaries have claimed the opposite: that human nature is inherently ugly, and that it is only the instruments of control that limit this ugliness and allow what little civilization there is. They say that without such control, this ugly behavior would rapidly reduce us to barbarity.
It seems that, as always, your approach is completely different and totally unique. Would you talk about this centuries-old controversy?

“The truth is, the whole controversy is absolutely wrong. It is based on prejudices, not on an experience of human nature.

“I speak from the experience of my own humanity, that the deeper you go the more cultured you are; the deeper you go the more graceful you are. The deeper you reach the more human you become. So I can say with absolute certainty and guarantee that man is not by nature ugly.

“Man by nature is born absolutely innocent, neither ugly nor cultured, just a tabula rasa. Whatever you want to write on him he will become.

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