How Moderation Works

 

As an ethicist and metaphysician, I am convinced that the principle of moderation is how the world stays in balance and functions well, and this application of this principle to our plans, choices, tactics, and strategies seems advisable if one were to lead a happy, healthy, free, moral and prosperous life.

 

If the classical logicians are correct, then there are no true contradictions and contradictions do not exist in reality. That is not the human condition, for humans are a pile and mess of boiling contradictions. Humans are over 100,000 years old, as a species, and we are living contradictions, part rational and part irrational, part good and part evil, part free will, and often determined by internal and external forces that we might not even be aware of, let alone control. We are part angel and part devil. We are immaterial and material and biological at the same time.

 

It is amazing that we are as sensible, reasonable, good, and happy as we are in light of what we are and the opposing forces clashing and warring in our bodies and throughout our consciousness and thinking processes.

 

Humans are existing dialetheia. We are rational and can think, but we feel and live instinctively so often. Our logic is binary, and we add in other logics and truth values as whim strikes us.

 

The great irony is that an Objectivist, like what the Randians espouse, is righter than not. The universe is ruled by the law of contradiction, and contradictions mostly are false and do not exist, and that is the prime set of axioms guiding how a good, spiritual and rational human should live.

 

Yet, we also are ruled by sentiment, but must indulge that as our minor emphasis, and some true contradictions grow out of that.

 

It may seem that irrationalists and subjectivists like existentialists are more holistic, allowing for the use of reason and law of noncontradiction, juxtaposed with passionate choices and some law of the included middle.

 

That is somewhat true but is mostly false and leads to evil. We need to put existence before essence somewhat and to feel more than think, but the major emphasis must be thinking and reasoning consistently/ The moderate wholeness of this combination of major emphasis (reason) more than the minor emphasis (feeling) is the moderate, ideal way to live, think and conclude.

 

To be wholly irrational, groupist and subjective--as are the postmodernists are--is to lead a blind, radical existence with fervent worship of a fake idol or cause erected and worshiped to replace legitimate faith in and devotion to a benevolent divinity.

 

Too much nonindividuation, group-living, passionate deciding and true believing in a cause lead to a monism in which one pole of an opposition is worshiped as pure goodness, which is not true real or good.

 

Fate or the One is the whole universe but God and the Devil and their respective millions of followers populate the world.