Black and WhiteAbsolut  ismRelativ
The more I think about it, and look at my experiences, the more I become convinced that EVERY system of thought ends in 'enlightened absolutism'. That means admitting that Relativism is only a temporary, but ESSENTIAL, state WITHIN absolutism. When focusing your thoughts on some concept everybody can be perfectly relativist, but when acting PURELY on intuition then ONLY traditionalist or absolute behavior is used. The word 'purely' exactly shows the problem. Acting purely on intuition is becoming more and more rare in a 'rational' world. In daily life you find a continuous 'fight' between intuition and pure reason (sense/relativism and logic/absolutism). Pure reason can go anywhere, pure intuition tends to value different standpoints. On a lot of places in society you find superfluous 'thinking' in opposites: Left versus right, progressive versus conservative, authoritarian versus relativist, peace versus war, hunger versus wealth etc. 'Thinking' (religious use of logic) at best leads to several absolute camps living in peaceful coexistence by having destructive weapons. To get out of this draw in another way then by destroying all but one camp, you need relative forces on ALL sides.  As an example let me take the former Cold War: My view is that all of us want to go AHEAD, and not either left or right in a weapon race. Then the logicians and the intuitives should cooperate. Both the boldness and rigidity of logic and the valueing of standpoints by sense are useful. Without revalueing past experience humanity every time risks making the same mistakes. But change is inevitable, without change life becomes a rigid and awfully slow way. Evolution is a game of chance, and every now and then that takes playing another card.  Using this view I honestly don't see why being conservative should collide with being progressive, and vice versa. Instead both sides need each other. Conservatives need progressives to make real progress, and progressives to avoid risking really making a mess need to be watched with an eye for history. These sides present two essentially different ways of coping with chance. Taking risk and being careful. Both are necessary, risk can't be avoided but being careful doesn't hurt. It's the way in which companies get big. It's like playing a game of poker. Without knowing and remembering everything that can be learned from the card you're certainly gonna be surprised. And without one a while using your poker face you're not gonna win. But it takes both to be really successful. When conservative political parties start talking about making progress, and progressive ones about taking care of continuity than it is time to take care. Then they are not really fighting anymore for their main concern, and instead mainly trying to win votes. Then things have changed in bureaucracies fighting mainly for their life. Black and white obviously need each other to make gray. It is confusing to produce gray mixing left-gray and right-gray. Without already starting from mixed gray views it is still possible to create every shade of gray. The gray background of this page was created using the picture above with the black and white squares. It presents a view on black and white thinking. The extremes are clear and show no need for fighting. Then the fighting must be caused by becoming gray to win votes. But everybody wants to go ahead, who needs voting? The actual need for voting comes from political kings and queens, it is caused by disguised egoism. Being self-centered might be good in times of war, but in other times without doubt is very counterproductive. Such people act on the wrong stage, and would make perfect actors. We have to get rid of PREJUDICES like growth being rigid improvement in only one direction. Or it being jumping from one view to another, without getting any wiser. Growth is taking risk but also like cautiously blowing an ALMOST continuous sequence of slightly different absolute bubbles.  |
most pictures on the websites of Henk Tuten
