Duality

I push my fingers into my eyes. Oh wait… let’s start again.

The world is full of opposition. Democrats, Republicans. Good, bad. Up, Down. Day, night. Right, wrong. Light and dark. These opposites need each other as they define each other. Darkness is the absence of light. Now what if half of a duality ceased to exist?

The first thought is if bad stopped existing, everything would be good, right? But honestly, how would you know if something is good if nothing was bad? Wouldn’t everything simply be the same? I do think an argument could be made that it would still be good, but you couldn’t really call it that since you couldn’t define it.

To clarify, this stops working if we discuss something tangible like left and right. If right didn’t exist, then theoretically, there would be no spectrum of right to left. There would only be forwards, backwards, up and down. Applying this logic you can’t have one side of a dichotomy without the other.

Unfortunately, this would mean our life can’t exist without death and happiness without pain. Also, this duality is like a pendulum. The more it swings to one side, the higher it reaches on the other side. This can be seen in our example from Resonance, where trauma generally pushes artists to greatness.

What does this mean for us and the world as a whole? We can never truly rid the world, or our world (sphere of influence), of the things we don’t want. They exist to balance us and define us. We have to reach the lowest lows to reach the highest highs.