A lot of people I know who frankly should know better consider me a pessimist and/or an apocalyptarian, friends and family both. I'm neither. But I do think radical opposites are always present in existence: creation and destruction, good and evil, life and death, peace and war, being and becoming, victory and defeat, humor and seriousness, dynamism and inertia, light and darkness, and they make themselves equally manifest in every development. Within every dark moment is the seed of light, within every light moment the seed of darkness.
Life is a probability map of binary choices: with every thought, we're faced with a choice of action: we act on every thought, or we do not, and therefore we make thousands, sometimes millions, of binary choices every day, each one of which leads to an un-traceable infinity of consequences from other binary choices which our choices cause. Sometimes the choice is not binary - there are times when there are multiple choices, and times when there is only one, but the majority of choices consist of one choice, or the other. Usually: action, or inaction. So therefore, anyone who thinks that you can root out an evil actions as though we can rid ourselves of those quintillions of binary choices that happen throughout the world every day, is not just wrong, but self-fulfillingly destructive to the purposes they wish to fulfill, because the seed of evil is in every good action, and leads to a series of consequences that both seem unpredictable at the time and seem easily foreseeable in hindsight.
No one is more deadly than a person who thinks they have good on their side and evil on the other. so when we come to Manichean moments like right now, when two sides of America are at each other's throats, whatever my political inclination, and mine is surely toward the left rather than to the right, and however obvious it currently is (and it really fucking is....) that the right has so many thousands of times more to answer for in our generation than the left, a very deep alarm goes off in me when people start embracing all the conflicting pathologies of the other side -one side secular yet with the credulousness of religion, the other religious yet with the means of secularity, and both simultaneously utopian yet retributive. The 'both sidesism' of this is not Republicans vs. Democrats, it's not conservatives vs. liberals, it's reactionaries vs. revolutionaries. One side believes in all means to forestall progress, the other believes in all means to expedite it.
But there is no such thing as limited war by unlimited means. Life is a cold war. Life and death are the two facts of existence, and if all options are on the table, all options will eventually be used.
There is no such thing as life without the anxiety that it can all end tomorrow, and there never has been in the entire existence of life on earth. Even the supposed acceleration of human progress was achieved at the expense of the planet's other species, and the planet now threatens us with revenge.
We either make our peace with the idea that arguments and people we loathe will always be at the other side of our table, or we kill each other by the millions until we get too tired of death and we go back to the table again, this time with far less of us.
That's the binary choice: make your peace with people you will always loathe, try to defeat them in a cold war and know that you'll lose some battles that are at least relatively deathless, or kill each other until you're tired of people dying, and it goes without saying, one side currently has most of the weapons....
Some kind of long-term civil conflict on American soil seems almost inevitable in our lifetimes: the planet is just too hot, the internet is just too fractured, America is just too damaged. But how bad it gets depends on how willing mainstream Democrats are to throw over their previous willingness to be the rational side at the expense of Republicans getting more and more insane, and how gullible they become in a potential Biden administration about the idea that justice and equality is just around the corner if we empower revolutionaries who say plainly every day their desire to overthrow liberals forever, or how desperate they become in a second Trump term to willingly give the party over to its most illiberal elements. The time may come where we have to really and truly resist Republican insanity, but don't kid yourselves about what that means. However bloody you can imagine it will be, quadruple it. Once we're there, the only way out is to be just that ruthless until everybody is exhausted into negotiating concessions.
So let's not fucking get there.
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