Well it has been some time since I have been mad here.
And it escalates. The YouTube channel is going well and I have decided that you can go against your nature. I have spoken about this a fair bit in other posts; talking about the Scorpion and the Frog and generally trying to find a way to be a better man while all the time fighting against ‘my nature’.
I have decided it is fight I am going to lose! I will lose, not because it is a battle that I cant win, not because using all my strategies is invalid, but because the one thing that continues to be my achilles heal will always trip me up, and that is – I am me.
But, it not a fight I am prepared to give up on.
Here comes in “The Dialectic”. Dialectic thinking is a pretty hard thing to explain – I tried once in a previous p
ost and used my time in Bali as an example – bearing in mind philosophers have been arguing about it for years, sorry centuries! They can’t come up with a definitive answer so how am I. Well lets start off with a few of THEIR definitions and then I’ll get to how this is MY answer:
Dialectic thinking:
“a method of argument or exposition that systematically weighs contradiction, facts or ideas with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions”
(Fuck, that made my brain hurt!)
“The process of reconciliation of contradictions”
(That’s better – a bit like me.)
To me it is, allowing two contradictory ideas to exist at the same time.
Can I be the Scorpion and the Frog at the same time. Can I still be shitted off by most things and wanting to tell most people I meet to get fucked AND be a better man. Does one contradict the other so much that there can be no conciliation between the two. The philosophers seem to think so – I do not!
I am me, sometimes it is not a pretty sight, but I am also resolved to be a better man – a man who lives his values, his beliefs and his convictions. A man who is not wandering through life oblivious to my own existence. A man who thinks a person is better, bigger and more important that the latest LCD Internet connects 100 inch TV.
To me dialectic thinking is about being those contradictions.
Not living those contradictions in conflict but just living them; as a better man.
As someone once said to me, how will you know when you are the ‘better man’ or is it a continuous process that never finishes.
I thought about it for a moment and said “Fuck if I know, but I refuse to continue living as a robot”.
I hope that my new series of videos “The Dialectic” goes a bit of the way to changing ‘Fucked if I know” to “Fuck me, I get it!”