THEY say, “Democracy is the best we’ve got, until someone comes up with something better.”  A meaningless factoid that suggests that devising a better system of government is too complex, so best leave it.  It keeps people in their placeboed place.

THEY treated the fall of the USSR as the victory and justification of capitalism, whereas it was actually the failure of a national communist system.  It keeps vested interest in its inequitable and rapacious place.

THEY say, “You should use some common sense.”  Although rarely does the reasoning behind such an exhortation make sense, beyond surface impressions that do not bear further scrutiny.  It keeps open-minded analysis of subtextual detail in its place.

THEY criticise me for being deliberately awkward, but what is meant and desired is that I should do what others want me to do, and I should conform, without question.  I awkwardly refuse to be assigned a place.

THEY ARE US, of course.  Not you or me, but the corporate entity of society.  A generalist, abstraction of us.  THEY are a codification, a symbolic signification.  THEY could not exist without our complicity, as THEY do not exist outside our bred-in conception(s).  Like birds forming into a flock or electricity following the path of the current, we are educated into and follow the idea of the social project on automatic pilot, on a subconscious indoctrinated-since-birth level, blindly accepting the imprecise and vaguely obscure WE of the collegiate mass and the THEY of Others.  Projections that group diverse individuals, that may or may not exist, into whatever linking theme the mind can grasp onto.  There is, generally, limited sound logic applied and a lot of tradition-conditioned pre-conception.

Call me foolish, but I try to apply rational thought.  I do not do something because everyone else does it or it has always been that way, but I use a toolkit of critical thought acquired over the years to analyse, to arrive at my own opinion and interpretation.  Of course, I can still fall back on the lazy and inadequate ways of unconsidered conventional thought, and I am fallible; but I try to dig into the truth and sense of things rather than simply accept what I am told.  Some people find this constant interrogation of facts and information wearing, but it is better than mindlessly going along with the ill-considered or prejudiced view. 

At the same time, I actively seek and promote the absurd and illogical: our days would be dry and dull without flights of fancy, and I feel I would wither and die without the joy of doing the improper or surreal thing.  The absurd is often the logical way to go.

“But, aren’t you being contradictory?”  I can hear the reader say.

Well, yes and no (cough).

If conventional thinking is followed then I am being contradictory, but I judge convention guilty of incoherent understanding.  Contradiction is a concept based on the foundational sub-concept of binary oppositions: right and wrong, left and right, positive and negative, etc.   Although in common usage, binary oppositions are over-simplistic ideologies, with a related blind faith in their incomplete truth.  They are convenience tools that do not have depth, a symptom of the limited capacity of the human mind to encompass too much information, so we over-simplify to something that appears to be correct but is really a practical mode of operation that works in temporal context and enables us to interact contingently with an existence that is too large for us to grasp holistically.

I am, in fact, being oxymoronic. 

The oxymoronic nature of life can be seen in the inherent conflict between dogmatic thought and complex relativity of historical precedent.  For example … In England in the 1600s, the puritans thought they were the elect of God and were assured of their righteousness, but at the same time they accepted that all humans were flawed and prayed fervently that God would forgive them their errors.  Idealism posited the notion of progression towards perfection, a unification in God, conveniently overlooking that the concept of perfection would encompass everything, which would include flaws.  More recently, there has been the modernist tradition of The State, mass ideologies and structures, grouping single units into large abstract concepts while espousing the primacy of individual freedom.  Etc.  Hypocrites.  Underneath, there lies a monolithic conceit that life can be ordered into universal, definitive categories.  It is not so.

Existence is pluralistic, relativistic and constantly changeable.  For example, by analogy … The universe is composed of atoms and each atom is different, so the number of different atoms equates to the size of the universe.  From each atom the perspective or view is different.  You could see the same atom from marginally different viewpoints from every point of a roughly described circle of each other atom around the target atom; and then you could add distance to the equation to make miniscule incremental concentric circles inwards or outwards (depending on perspective) across the length and breadth of the universe of atoms.  So, the possible viewpoints on each atom is greater than the size of the universe, as you can look at the same atom from the perspective of each other atom in the universe, and then you could look at the next atom from every other point of the universe too, then the next atom, and so on.  Incomprehensible numbers of circles criss-crossing like a huge Venn diagram of perspective, overlapping infinitesimally closely, throughout the universe.  And then everything constantly moves and changes position, grows and decays, at an individual level.  Possible perspectives are therefore more than the size of the universe squared or cubed; so we adjust our approach and limit frame(s) of inquiry in order to cope with this incomprehensibly massive number of perspectives on a localised level, to see things as they appear to us in the immediate context.  It is notable that maths, the ultimate in trying to catalogue and order life, has a symbol for infinity because some things are not calculable.

Apply this to the limitations of a human, and it becomes apparent that this is how it is possible to hold two equal and opposite views at the same time.  The gaze implies a unitary viewpoint, a perspective from which the viewer looks on, but you can shift and look at the same item from the opposite angle.  But it is not just two potential or opposite views: you can look at an object or subject from a multitude of possible angles, with very subtle variations of perspective involved.  However, humans must necessarily select what to explore from the space of the self, the body, the eyes: the single, narrow viewpoint of the bodily shell.  These individual viewpoints are grouped into social conceptions and abstractions via language and half-baked philosophies, by interaction with each other and our environment; and thus we become individuals and multiple.  A contradiction?  An oxymoron.

Which brings me back to the fallacy of black and white thinking, of binary oppositions, and another analogy.  Life is not black and white or, as is commonly said, shades of grey: it is red and green and blue etc, and that’s just the colour spectrum.  In fact, black and white are both non-colours and are at the two ends of the colour spectrum, more similar to each other than anything else.  Opposites but the same.  Now, tell me that’s not both absurd and logical?

How can we cope with this overwhelming and changing complexity?  Existence is so large and fractal that we cannot hope to understand it holistically: we can even struggle with the complicated detail of small things!  But …

We can manage what we do know, within our sphere, rationally and critically, with scrutiny: the type of sense which holds true is relative to the situation, of a localised analytical kind.  We can understand the workings of a clock or the metabolism of a butterfly or a conversation or life as it exists on planet Earth by considering operational function in the immediate term. 

However, no clock-maker in the 1920s would have imagined a digital clock, nor could they repair it, and analysing the metabolism of a butterfly could only have happened after the dissections of the 1800s.  Thus the body of knowledge changes, and we will never comprehend completely; but we can use critical logic and continual review of our understanding to mitigate and cope with change, relatively.

And we can enjoy living, to find pleasure in the magnificent diversity, where new views are constantly emerging, flowering and passing on.  It is beautiful.  This is not best done by blindly going about like a conditioned pink robot.  It is the sign of mature thought to observe, scrutinise and change mind as the body of information and physical form within view changes; and, very importantly, at the same time, to have fun with the wild unpredictability of it all.

Try to be logical, but relish the weird.  Enjoy life, but don’t be its fool.

We are all oxymorons.