Certain divisive areas of human life, most especially politics and religion I tend to notice, often create sharply polarized and even tribal divisions between groups of people who seem to desire and pursue highly dissimilar visions of society, culture, morality, economics, character, attitude, and much else. A tension immediately arises between the impulse to unify these disparate and often antagonistic groups around shared values, and the opposing impulse to vilify and denounce the other. The unifying impulse is often associated with and justified by rhetoric resembling some version of “we all ultimately want the same thing”, the implication being that the ultimate vision is the same, whereas the differences lie within the more superficial components of approach and technique, being that if we zoom out far enough we will behold a highly unifying bigger picture of the grand vision we all ultimately seek. But, is this actually true, coherent, or even possible to discern? How vague and abstract a vision must we reduce in order to reconcile this? Does anyone actually know what they want? Are certain political philosophies merely a means to an end which will eventually give way to some kind of utopia that is as practically attained through putting an opposing ideology into practice? Is this a tension we even want resolved, or is the very push and pull that generates so much energy and reactive momentum in politics largely dependent on this dynamic?
We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto
