Contradictions and Paradoxes
Is living as a human a pretty socially precarious existence? We’re not sure what to believe, who to believe, how that might affect our relationships with others? If it might get us cancelled? Can we even square our own beliefs and ensure that they are consistent? Or are we just walking contradictions and paradoxes?
I don’t know about you, but I have inconsistencies, contradictions. In what I believe. In what I say. In what I do. And I don’t know what to do about it.
It is easy to write it off as just the price of being alive in the time period we live in. But is that a cop out? Am I giving myself a pass? Is it really that hard to be consistent? Or, am I just not up to the task?
Honestly, I really don’t know. I’ve written elsewhere in this project about how hard it is to figure out what to believe and who to believe. How hard it is for us to even figure out what we believe. Or to parse the difference between belief and knowledge. Or, how hard it is to trust our own sensations and understanding the limits of our understanding. And, what it even means to be a self.
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Life is hard to make sense of. Reality is hard to make sense of. Society is hard to make sense of. Does that mean we shouldn’t even try?
Is that the central paradox of living now? That it is so hard to make sense of anything that we just give up and do whatever? Kind of like that concept in the show The Good Place, (SPOILER ALERT) that life had just become far too complex that no one can actually get admitted to the so-called “Good Place” when they die? And, indeed, no one has for the last 521 years? Because every choice we make has incredible negative consequences, even if we aren’t aware of them? Because everything has gotten so complex that every decision we make is linked to all of these systems that exploit others and despoil the planet?
This is hard stuff to ponder. Add to that that there are things we just can’t know. There are uncertainties. We have to live with them, accept that we can’t know everything. That there are things we will never know.
And yet we have to live.
Maybe that is the paradox? That we have to live despite the incredible uncertainties that confront us daily. And we all want to live well. Maybe we even all think we are trying to live well. How can we know if we are or aren’t? Who decides what constitutes living well and not living well? Or what constitutes trying to live well? Again, more unanswerable questions.
Maybe the answer is compassion. Self-compassion. And compassion for others. If we all recognize how hard it is to be consistent, to live well according to some kind of ethical code, would it be easier to not be as hard on ourselves or each other? Could we all cut each other and ourselves some collective slack? I don’t know.
It sounds good, but is there a catch? What if the catch is that in accepting our contradictions, our paradoxes, the mistakes we will make, we also accept our responsibility to learn and grow. To improve ourselves in some way that causes less harm to those around us, to the world around us. That our self-compassion also gets turned outward toward others. And that we diligently try to improve.
Could all of this be summed up in saying, try not to be an asshole?