There was a wholeness before the schism. A single breath that knew no name of belonging. Hands, back then, did not clutch flags but other flesh, recognizing each other not by symbol but by warmth. The first cut was the subtlest, a razor’s thread in the air: religion. Not faith, that nocturnal yearning of the soul toward the infinite, but its institution, its dogma. Behold the perverse alchemy: taking mystery and locking it within walls, taking the shiver of the sacred and turning it into law. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ were born. The ‘us’ that prays toward the east and the ‘them’ that pleads toward the west. The ‘us’ that received the revelation and the ‘them’ that walks in darkness. The same fingers that caressed a face learned to trace boundary lines in the dust, to erect altars that were, in their stony heart, bastions.

Then came the second cut, deeper, which sought to organize the wound: politics. If religion had invented the other’s soul, politics invented their social body. Power, which is an art of managing resources, became the art of managing divisions. No longer clans or tribes, but factions, parties, ideologies. People began to speak not to understand, but to win. The town square, once a place of market and encounter, became a stage for opposing shouts. The word “community” emptied itself of its original warmth to fill with a cold, exclusive meaning. People were offered an identity of compensation: you are no longer a complete human being, you are a citizen, a voter, a militant. And as such, your value is measured by your loyalty to the faction, by your ability to hate the designated enemy.

Finally, the third and most merciless of the cuts: money. Economics, a human science that should narrate the story of exchange and need, became the supreme metric of human value. After religion and politics had divided souls and social bodies, money classified the remains. It assigned a number, a rating, a price. It transformed desire into consumption, need into debt, relationship into transaction. Man was no longer judged for what he was, but for what he possessed. Poverty, a condition that could be endured with dignity in a cohesive society, became a fault. Wealth, often a matter of luck or unscrupulousness, became a merit. In this new temple, money is both the idol and the priest, and its word is the contract, which has supplanted the human pact of trust.

Now look at the landscape these three knives have drawn. Men and women walking beside one another, yet inhabiting parallel universes. They cross paths on the street, exchange goods, sometimes even smiles, but they are separated by invisible barriers of faith, of flag, of bank account. The great lie is not in religion, politics, or money themselves. The lie is in their pretense of being ends, when they are only imperfect means. They are maps, and we have mistaken the map for the territory. We have forgotten the single body, the common breath.

Perhaps the search, now, is not for an impossible return to innocence. It is perhaps to rediscover, beneath the encrustations of imposed identities, the simple, stubborn, human fragility. The hand that does not first ask to whom you pray, nor for whom you vote, nor how much you earn, but that reaches out because it has recognized, in another face, the same awe and the same fear of being alive, here, now, under the same mute and splendid sky.