Thursday, September 06, 2007

Order, Death but not chaos

One of the themes of technical analysis - is this: "humans feel the need to impose order in their lives."

Right now, looking at my room I'm not too sure.

Its messy like hell. But I guess I'll get around to tidying it up.

But that idea is right- humans always feel the need to get things in order, and have a system going.

During WW2 in one of the terrible Japanese air raids over Singapore, a lot of people got killed. Caucasians, Eurasians, Chinese, Malays, Skihs, Indians, Tamils, etc..

Because there were so many dead bodies, a mass burial pit was dug up, and the survivors started placing the dead inside. They didn't simply throw the bodies in, no.

They placed them according to their races, the Caucasians on one side, the Indians on one side, the Chinese on the other, the Malays over there.

Doesn't that strike you as odd? They are dead. Corpses. Bluntly, food for worms. Yet, they carefully placed them in categories according to the ethnic origin.

This is a great example of humans bringing order to chaos. There's a war. Its one big awful tragedy multiplied a thousand times. And people feel they need to have a system going.

2 comments:

Jason Mullinder said...

Its hard to know what to make of that, building something after a tragedy combined with reinforcing racial/class divisions...
Human nature I guess, it was not necessarily bigotry etc motivating it may have been a simple desire to try keep families together.

Yauming YMC said...

Yes, I didn't mean bigotry. I meant the ad hoc burial group wanted to bring some semblance of order into the whole tragedy - probably at an sub-conscious level. Its poignant in a way. And maybe if there were kids, and women involved then "keeping the family together" makes some sense too.