Something to learn from politicians

I did not think that I would ever say this, but it is actually very true. People like things they understand, and dislike things they don’t understand. It is so true that it is painful. They like it even more when the things they understand are presented to them on a clear and transparent platter. They don’t even have to think, they can just easily relate. This is why a happy-go-lucky “family man”  always becomes a good presidential candidate, and the one with logical ideas and complex plans of saving the nation gets lost in obscurity, or does not make it to the top at all. Maybe this is why politics stinks. Mathematicians and scientists hate it; they hate having to obstruct the truth in order to elevate themselves. Corollary? Politics is made up of people who love themselves more than logic. Heck, they have their own logic which they see just as valid as objective logic. And everyone else? Just as they would rather watch a sappy TV show rather than devour Emerson to learn about the human psyche, they would rather follow a demagogue to their doom than listen to their own reason. Very sad.

This is very much me right now. Comic (c) xkcd.com

Interesting Dualities

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. — Isaac Asimov

Duality – loving eternal classics and fleeting current events; diving into empirical science and controversial history; merging spontaneity with focus. Where is the line where my many dual interests acquire the beautiful word, Paradox? Perhaps I am not at fault when I cannot help creating it. It is a child of nature itself. Waves and particles. Perhaps life is indeed like light? No, I am not entering into a philosophical treatise – I am merely reflecting on my own discovery of the miracles of this earth…in an attempt to retrace my steps into the heart of how my journey began. After all, the heart, too, is an entity of a dual nature, both physically and psychologically…

My intellectual journey began with corpuscles—things of my own creation, those I could touch and see and feel right away. Creating art, poetry, and imaginary worlds soothed my physical senses. These particles of thought existed right there, within the outline of ink, within the electronic characters of Times New Roman. I need not worry about the mechanism behind them. They flowed so naturally from my fingertips, as they are now. But how did these particles originate? Surely they did not materialize via a spontaneous chemical reaction, or a fortunate collision of photons in a vacuum. No, they were a result of both a subconscious and a deliberate thought (again, duality – oh, it haunts us!) that metastasizes in my mind after an analysis of an intriguing novel, a view of an inspirational play, or a discussion with a curious person. The thought grows like a bacterial colony—it needs an abundant nutritional foundation to survive and expand. Without a proper amount of nutrient, the thought can no longer expand, but only replicate itself in more persistent, but no longer new, perspectives.

So what is one to do in order to break out of the reiteration of perspectives? To build a foundation that is complete? I have realized the answer in the second and current stage of my intellectual growth. I realized that waves are also at the essence of thought and progress. What is it about waves that fascinated me the most? Their power! Power to do good and evil, beneficial and destructive, the ornate and the ordinary… Just as behind the original particle theory there existed a world of waves, behind every-day occurrences there are…little mini-phenomena! Phenomena of light, sound, and energy, all of which are, well, waves! Did we just go in a circle? In a loop? Could this be a “Strange Loop” of Kurt Gödel within my own essay? When recounting the events of my own life, I find strange loops, strange paradoxes – strange dualities!

I myself live in a dual world; a world where I was born, with cold winters and a breathtaking history, and a world where I have found my future, a world of inspirational inventors and thinkers. I have been, for most of my life, a dual-speaker, thinking in dual-thoughts. I am a pragmatic idealist. I am a romantic realist. I am a succession of values and principles that I firmly hold in my agar plate of thoughts. I am someone who recognizes duality—in order to create light.