How we save ourselves.
Look at the record. Civilization repeats itself. Power rises, hardens, collapses, and rises again somewhere else. The scale grows with every turn. The form does not change.
A pattern that large is made of something small. It is the sum of a subpattern each of us runs every day, in how we meet whatever we do not already believe. Find the subpattern and you can stop running it. Enough people stop, and the large pattern has nothing left to turn on.
That is the wager. To get there, you have to learn something. That is harder than it sounds.
Ontological death
To learn, you have to let in information that does not fit how you see the world. Everything in you is trained to treat what does not fit as a threat.
It is a threat. Not to you. To your toolkit. Your worldview is a set of instruments: how you sort things, weigh them, decide what is real and what matters. Information those instruments cannot measure would prove the instruments wrong. So they refuse to measure it. You do not see it at all.
Letting it in feels like dying. Call it ontological death. Not the end of your life. The end of the tools you were handed to live inside the system. Notice who that actually threatens. Not you. The system that gave you the tools. Your health does not depend on its health. Often it is the opposite.
Science does this on purpose. Every paradigm shift scraps the old model and the instruments that built it, because the old instruments could not see the data that broke it. That is learning in the real sense. Not adding to the pile. Dropping the frame.
Go one step further than science goes. Every model is incomplete, because every model leaves out the one doing the modelling. You do not fix that with a better model. You fix it by holding no model as final, and meeting the world directly. Learn that, and you can learn anything.
Two kinds of rhythm
Now the pattern.
Nature runs on rhythm. On and off. Light and dark. Crest and trough. Each pair is a polarity: two states that alternate, and each needs the other to exist. There is no crest without a trough. The rhythm runs at every scale.
Something in you already wants to object. Maybe there is an exception. Hold that impulse, because it is the mechanism.
That impulse starts a different rhythm. A position. A doubt. A counterposition. Hegel named it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It looks like natural polarity and it moves like it. But it needs no truth to start, only doubt. And the two sides do not need each other. Each would be happier if the other disappeared.
Hegel described the mechanism accurately. What he could not do, from where he stood, was see that his own system was one more turn of it.
What the synthesis actually is
Follow the dialectic out into the world. One side gathers believers, certain. The other side gathers believers, just as certain. The synthesis is not a more complete truth. It is a winner and a loser. The winner becomes the new thesis. The loser carries the seeds of the next antithesis. The wheel turns.
You know the examples. Democrat and Republican, trading power without anyone seeing more clearly. Capitalism and communism, and the ground, air and water poisoned under both. Left and right. The content changes. The machine does not.
These are false dichotomies. They mimic a natural rhythm, but they are artificial. They do not settle anything. They keep the division running, because division is what they run on.
Self and other
Beneath all of them is one more.
From birth we are taught that self and other are a dichotomy: two sides, each of which could exist without the other, each serving itself at the other's cost. That is the conditioning. It is the line drawn through the middle of every person.
It is false. Self and other are a natural polarity. Each requires the other by definition. There is no self without an other to be distinct from, and no other without a self to be other to. They are one thing seen from two places.
See that, and the dialectic loses its fuel. A position stops being an identity to defend. Doubt stops being a reason to fight and shows itself for what it is: the edge of your own bias. New information stops being a threat and becomes information.
Breaking the cycle
That is the subpattern, and that is how you stop running it.
One person who stops changes nothing you can measure. Enough people, and the larger pattern loses its footing. The cycle of conflict gives way to a natural rhythm.
You have been doing it wrong this whole time. Now you know how. Don't fuck it up.
You're welcome.
© 2024 Burch Driver
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