Sunday, April 8, 2007

You need everyone

It seems a paradox. But society needs all these different people with different, completely opposed and sometimes incompatible ideas, in order to be stable. When there are a plurality of competing ideologies, of wildly different people, the resulting society is healthier. It's a weakness, a slowness of a true democracy, but it's also a major advantage of it. It's not just about variety, about the relief from the boredom of uniformity. The whole system actually works better if you have:

Pragmatic empiricists arguing with genius logicians. Idealists raging against apathetic people who laugh at the idealists for their naivety. Communists arguing with Capitalists arguing with Anarchists arguing with Fascists. Mathematicians arguing with lawyers arguing with historians arguing with biologists arguing with linguists. The rich feeling guilty for their subjugation of the poor who enjoy being able to blame their misfortunes on their subjugation. Nihilists arguing with seven-day-adventist moralist fundamentalists. The sweet resentment of the pitied ugly toward the beautiful. Materialists flaunting the things which irritate spiritualists so much. Spiritualism's mockery of the deathbed sorrow of the materialist.The strong happy to care for the weak who want the strong to care for them.The dramatists who don't give a shit about the real issues but simply want drama. Businessmen ignoring poets who ignore businessmen. The optimists to remind the pessimists of the possibilities that the pessimists remind the optimists don't exist. Theists and atheists duelling, and snatching ideas from each other, and from different religions. The morbid drawn towards the death that the squeamish want to avoid talking about.

Some countries claim to be a democracy but really are composed of citizens with a ruthlessly communitarian, authoritarian, conformist culture.

1 comment:

Eastcoastdweller said...

Absolutely. Truth has nothing to fear from anyone or anything. I despise any religion, any ideology, any philosophy-so-called, that is so weak and frail that it cannot brook competition and must resort to censorship or violence in order to retain its followers.