A new word for you: Manichaeism
Earlier this week, I was watching “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” when he interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter. When commenting on the failure of the current US President, Brzezinski accused George Bush of “Manichean paranoia”. I’m convinced that nobody in the audience – and even possibly Jon Stewart himself – had any idea what he was talking about.
In fact, , Brzezinski was refering to Manichaeism which Answer.com defines as “A dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically evil and mind as intrinsically good.” Clearly Brzezinski had in mind Bush’s foreign policy approach based on the view that the US faces “an axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran and North Korea).
An irony of the use of the term Manichaeism in the context of Iran is that this dualistic religion was found by a man called Mani in the 3rd century AD in Persia (present day Iran).