One of the most interesting and important ideas we learned about when reading about the Yogacara Buddhists is the independence of subject and object. “People consider that there are also material objects in the world, really existing outside the mind. Are these not different from the mind? The Buddha replies that they are indeed not different but deluded, unenlightened people do not understand the teaching of ‘only perception” (Williams 89) Human beings are categorical by nature, we categorize plants, mountains, rivers, animals, even other people, because this is the only way that we can understand the world around us. For example when the "colonists" first landed in America the first thing they did was give the town they created a name, Jamestown, Roanoke, etc... Human beings naturally start to develop an association with names and what those names intrinsically represent. This is, according to Yogacara, what leads us into trouble. For example those same colonists had no issues warring with the local Indian tribes in order to protect their settlement, how were they going to let those Godless Indians take Jamestown from them? The fact that the settlement had a name created unity within the settlement, but also an exclusion of those outside the settlement. The Indians might have been on that land first, but the colonists were the first ones to Jamestown and that made that property theirs. Now I don't know whether or not the Jamestown colonists actually fought frequent wars with the local Indians, I was just using the name "Jamestown" to represent colonial settlements in America as a whole. This ignorance of an object due to the name of it (the subject) is exactly what the Yogacaras warned against. A chair is not a chair, a chair is just an arrangement of wood and this can be demonstrated very easily with an axe. I compare this ignorance of an object due to a subject with the political correctness that is so prevalent today. Obviously the last thing anyone wants to do is offend a group of people (or more likely, get sued) however all political correctness really does is apply a synonym for word that is deemed offensive. No matter if you call a midget a little person or you call someone who is mentally handicapped retarded, people are going to know what you are talking about either way. For example it is much more offensive to say little people are not real people than to say I met a midget the other day and he was a very nice guy. People seem to dwell too much on the wording or phrasing of their speech rather than the actual content that speech contains. Names are irrelevant labels that people use to put on things and shove them into boxes far back into attics of their minds never to think of them again. A chair is just an arrangement of wood and every person is just an arrangement of cells, regardless of what they look, sound, act, smell or talk like. This was a concept grasped centuries upon centuries ago, why are we still struggling with it today?