Paint it Black

Today we are going to talk about the Manicheans.

Open up your digital painting program. Look at all the scales of grey that digital painting package has to offer. Everything from virgin A4 sheet to a colour only Anish Kapoor is allowed to paint in. So black you could paint a stuntship in that black and fly it into the sun at a Douglass Adams tribute concert.

The Manicheans did not have access to Inkscape. They didn’t even have access to MS Paint. What they did have was access to cutting edge religious heresy around the third century AD.

Dualist heresy attempts to answer the question: Why does God allow bad things to happen?

And the answer is two earths. God creates his first Earth and its, well, not quite the look he was going for. Not enough contrast maybe? Anish Kapoor hasn’t invented really black ™ yet. So he builds a second, perfect Earth. We have the misfortune of being born, living and dying on the shit one. Alt-Earth. Anti-Earth. And the God of light has a shadow of Darkness – a demiurge.

A dark side.

Early Christianity: The Snyder Cut. Eat your heart out DC – Mani was eighteen hundred years ahead of Jack Kirby.

Mani lived in Persia, in third century AD. He was heavily influenced by the Zoroastrians and Gnostic Christianity. There were hundreds of different Christian sects before the Council of Nicea kingmade Catholicism in AD 325.

Mani was long dead by then.

But people kept rediscovering Manichaeism. The Bogomils of Bulgaria in the tenth century. The Cathars of Alba in the Twelfth. The Hussites. And there are Chinese Christian Manichean sects allegedly surviving to this day.

Not the Cathars though.

You see, Manicheans and their many Mani-chums don’t see those greyscales. They see a world that is black and white. It’s a philosophy we call dualism.

If you believe that the world is alt-Earth, that only the perfect who live a life untouched by sin can be raised to the ‘real’ earth? Well, the institutions of our Earth – remember, we are the shit one – don’t actually serve God at all. Its all Popes and anti-Popes, and the Catholic Church had had more than enough of that sort of confusion thank you very much.

So they sent Simon de Montfort – of de Montfort University – to kill them all. Which he did. They retreated to Montsegur, where they jumped to their deaths rather than be captured. You see the crusaders had marched inland from the entrepot port of Beziers – famous for its tolerance, where Muslim, Jew, Cathar and Christian had lived for generations in harmony. And they knew what was coming.

And it wasn’t the Kingdom of God.

Outside Beziers the Crusaders asked Arnaud Almaric, the papal Legate, Abbot of Citeaux and religious head what they should do? The city was surrendering, and everyone looked the same? “Kill them all, God will know his own” said Almaric.

So they did.

As they went inland, the crusaders would blind all but one villager in every place they went, tie them together in a coffle and leave the person at the head of the coffle with one eye. Then they would drive the human centipede out of town in the direction they were heading. The message was clear “This will be you tomorrow”.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. If you ever wondered where that expression comes from, now you know.

The Cathars had believed they lived in hell before. Now they knew they did. They thought the Catholic Church was evil before, and now they had proved it. Undisputably.

And that’s the problem with Manichaeism. It’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy if everyone who doesn’t believe exactly like you is evil.

But this is a business blog, right? So is there a business lesson in all of this?

A lot of business is very Manichean. If you have only ever sold Magic: the Gathering, and you look at other products your first thought is ‘this is not Magic: the Gathering’. Magic. Not-Magic. Earth, Alt-Earth. Anti-Earth. And your customers are Manichean too – they’ll come into your store and go ‘whoa!!! That’s NOT MAGIC!’  

And they will be afraid. Like Pope Innocent III.

Scared people – people afraid of change and diversity – rarely make rational decisions.

In reality most people – most customers – are somewhere in that grey scale. Even in the Magic community, we saw – traditionally – a split between those who considered themselves perfecti – and just people who liked the idea of playing this goofy trading card game with Planeswalkers. We call these people gatekeepers, because they see everyone outside the gate as unworthy and we, as retailers, hopefully see those people as people we actively want to let in.

The Cathars believed that only by living a life of perfection from cradle to grave allowed you to pass through the gates and be reborn on perfect earth. They called these people the perfecti. If you weren’t already one, converting was pointless – you were already damned to reincarnate right here, in the shit, on the Earth ruled by the devil. Anything less than 100% perfect is damned.

Cancelled.

The Catholic Church of the twelfth century wasn’t proselytizing either. They’d stopped converting people and had starting butting heads on the borders. Protect the community you have – your status, your sales, your position – at all costs. Brook no disagreement. Instead of meeting in Nicea to discus theology they sent the boys around, with fire and sword and torture devices.

Neither of these positions are great business models.

Or political models.

Your business has no interest in ostracizing anyone who isn’t ‘pure’ enough to enter your gates. Throw those gates open. Let people in. Welcome them, even if their only reference is Monopoly. That middle ground, that grey scale is fertile. In business as well as in politics. Your business is diplomacy. It is a seduction. It’s not a crusade. You can like Pepsi and Coke. City and Rovers AND United. You can demonstrate through your acts why your cause is just, and win converts through being the most welcoming store you can be.

You can sell both Pepsi and Coke. Its not wormwood and gall.

And we can proselytize. We can covert people who don’t love boardgames and goofy nerd shit into people who might want to give it a go. Those pantone shades of grey are stepping stones, into the light from the darkness. Not everything has to be a damascene conversion, sinners into saints.

The bible contains quite a lot of forgiveness. You might even say that it’s a central theme throughout the New Testament. The book the crusaders at Bezier had sworn to uphold and protect before they massacred twenty thousand innocents.  

Be open to possibilities. The world isn’t perfect, but it’s not anti-Earth either. It’s what we make it, what we build ourselves here, right now. The Cathars, the Bogomils, the Manicheans, the Hussites – they were all wrong. It’s not a binary choice.

It’s a pantone swatch.