There are no dichotomies in nature. The sun is not the opposite of the moon. Yes, one is a lifeless rock, and the other a million nuclear bombs going off every moment, but both consist of matter; both are visible from Earth; both obey the laws of physics, circling endlessly.
Black is not the opposite of white. Neither exists, in truth. Both are artifacts of the way human eyes process light. Black is a body which does not reflect energy in frequencies we can see, and white is all of the colors meeting the EYE at once. Both, in sum, are properties of our hard wiring, not the universe.
For survival–and I don’t question there is some part of our organism which takes as its primary role that of ensuring our survival and reproduction–it is useful to draw distinctions in binary ways: safe/unsafe; friend/foe; edible/inedible; useful/useless.
In a final sense, though, all of these distinctions are illusions. In human society, quite often we make them true only by treating them as true. If you hate people, they will grow to hate you. Yet even if one of you kills the other, this does not mean that in any ontological way you were opposed: merely that one or both of you developed a pattern consistent with a perception that was not intrinsically accurate. Had one of you thought differently, and done things differently, a different outcome would have been achieved.
I want to be clear, though, that being nice is not the alternative to being cruel and vindictive. Being PERCEPTIVE is, and sometimes generating peace will involve violence. Sometimes love is expressed through indifference. Sometimes hate is expressed through what is called, wrongly, love.
It occurred to me today that there is a parallelism between the tactics chosen by the Arab descendants from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and those of Leninists.
Both are based upon hatred. Both have as their goal not the alleviation of the suffering of the people upon whose behalf they conceitedly believe they can speak, but rather the destruction of some hated Other.
The refugees will send their children from Gaza and the West Bank to kill civilian Jews. That the children die in the process does not faze them. It does not bother them that the policies of aggression and terrorism they choose FORCE the Israelis to be restrictive in what they tolerate. They don’t care that economic opportunities are rare in war zones, and that they are creating the war zone. They don’t care how many generations of their children are born into conditions of relative poverty, political instability,and violence.
It is possible to make peace with people who have rational objectives. It is not possible to make peace with people whose only desire is your destruction, and who are quite willing to commit social suicide to accomplish that aim, who are willing to sacrifice the next 10 generations of their children to get back at some hated Other, who has wounded their very profound vanity.
It is hard, often, not to see Islam as lending itself to the mindset of the slave, of someone BORN to take orders from others willing to do the work of thinking and perceiving. This need not be the case, but from the outside looking in, it appears that those people born every generation capable of innovation and creation are shunned and discouraged by those operating with the minds of slaves.
As I have often said, that life orientation I have called Cultural Sadeism likewise has as its aim punishing cultural Others, and not the objective alleviation of material inequalities, or shortages. Cuban leaders live well; the rest of society does not. None of them approach the wealth we take for granted here.
Logically, if the yes/no operator is symptomatic of the mechanical part of our existence, and if it is the primary tool of, say, dialectical materialism, then we can assume that all cultural systems based upon it are inferior with regard to perception, and correspondingly evil–if not always visibly, in the latent corruption which must attend an unwillingness to learn, to adapt, and to grow continually.