Opposites attract wisdom
All blessings are curses, and all curses are blessings.
It sounds like something William Blake might have written. I adapted it from a comment I read on YouTube.
His The Marriage of Heaven and Hell states such things as:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The line criticises the hypocrisy of institutional morality – religious and judicial – that so often breeds corruption and repression.
There is a valuable perspective to be gained in flipping established beliefs on their head – money is slavery, security is uncertainty.
I first reflected on how everything we believe can be considered in its opposite after reading the work of American economist Thomas Sowell. He argued, for instance, that far from helping the poor, minimum wage laws price low skilled workers out of the labour market, increasing unemployment among the most vulnerable. Another part of his research challenged the idea that affirmative action helps disadvantaged students. Sowell argued that, instead, such policies often place students in environments where they struggle academically, undermining their confidence and long term success.
Every now and then, when I come across a perspective altering work such as this, I add it to a bookshelf that I like to think one day I’ll go through with my children. The books are usually quite random, coming from all manner of different disciplines and time periods, but they share one key feature – perspective shifting ideas. The aim being to gently instil the awareness that, so often, everything can be considered in its opposite, and that opposites attract wisdom.
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I agree with the principle in theory but I’m not convinced it applies universally, Patrick.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it could be used to justify anything. There are still empire apologists for British colonialism in India, just as there are those who attempt to rationalize the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II, or even those unfolding in conflicts today.
I think openness to differing perspectives is important, but it has to be balanced with clear moral boundaries.
This is a rather bracing tonic to some of my long-held distaste for the ideas of conservatives in general (Epitomized by the anti-intellectual tripe of the U.S.’s deeply embarrassing 80s President, Ronald Reagan), without examining these ideas and some of their inherent logic and truth more closely.
Decades ago I recall dismissing Sowell as just another conservative, Friedman-ish polemicist. And, I deeply disliked Milton Friedman. Doing a bit of research tonight, I can more clearly see why you appreciate Sowell’s inversion of standard economic and social dogmas, and that the social ills that plague the under and lower classes stemming from poverty, are more complex problems of geography, class, education, family history and the like, and not necessarily stemming mostly from race and oppression.
However, the immmorality of capitalism, systemic racism, and discrimination based on race, has to be consistently at the forefront of society’s efforts to combat inequality, in part by means of government programs and funding at all levels — federal, state and local — for workable and tested solutions.