Manichaean
1
9.9
- adjective
- /ˌmænɪˈkiːən/
- Specialized
- Many political leaders adopt a Manichaean view, seeing the world strictly in terms of good versus evil.
- Manichaean struggle
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Watch on YouTubeI mean really never stopped was a Manichaean worldview.
- I mean really never stopped was a Manichaean worldview.
Examples
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In the Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Christian Gnostic traditions, there is an attempt to trace the origin of Good and Evil to two separate and antagonistic cosmic principles.
Academic text (2008) -
The OPEC decade of the 1970s has usually been portrayed as a Manichaean struggle between oil-producing countries, oil companies, and oil-importing countries to exercise market power for the purpose of garnering oil income for their own treasuries.
Academic text (1999) -
Today it has been seen less in terms of a Manichaean struggle between the forces of right and the forces of wrong.
Academic text (1993) -
Over the last forty years, however, Cold War liberals tended to a Manichaean view of world politics.
Academic text (1993) -
As hostility between the two states intensified, a Manichaean security paradigm developed in both of them.
Academic text (2009) -
In personality, they share vaulting ambitions, a passion for secrecy, and a Manichaean outlook that divides the world into agents and enemies.
Academic text (1991) -
An analyst like Hough operates with a Manichaean perspective that fails to integrally relate his liberal sense of social change to his Kremlinological focus.
Academic text (1991) -
But please bear in mind that this text, like so many of those that continue to withstand the changing fashions of the ages, defies a tidy Manichaean reading.
Academic text (1998) -
On the other hand, there was nothing comparable in postwar Western Europe to the almost Manichaean Cold War divide between the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government on Taiwan and the Communist one on the mainland.
Academic text (2003) -
Where Huizinga and people of his generation and cast of mind still tended to cling to a dichotomous, if not Manichaean, view of the life of the mind in a mechanized world, many of the younger generation had radically adopted the machine as a potent ingredient of contemporary culture.
Academic text (1990)
Synonyms
3
8.2
Relating to a belief that reality has two opposite parts, for example mind and body
1
9.9
Dividing things into only good or evil
1
9.9
Relating to an ancient belief that the world is a struggle between light and darkness
Surface Forms
Morphology
Manichaean = Manichaeism (transparent) = manichae + ean
The adjective is a straightforward denominal formation from the religion name 'Manichaeism' and directly relates to that religion.
Etymology
Manichaean comes from Mani, a teacher from long ago who said the world is a battle between 'good' and 'evil'. So when something is Manichaean, it is about that simple split of 'good' versus 'evil'.