There’s a term from 1984, doublethink, which essentially means “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In the context of 1984 it represents a means of fascist mind control: as in if the government tells you one thing on Monday, and then something completely different on Tuesday, you’d damn well better believe what they said to be true on Tuesday despite the obvious contradiction in your head. It is a bad thing in this context, however, since we live in a universe of paradoxes, I believe it’s actually an important ability to have. Often in this universe, two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas are both true. One example I was thinking of a few minutes ago is humanity. I feel that we are simultaneously worthless debauched immoral dregs, and at the same time godly and beautiful. How can this be? How can we be both slimy scum and perfect god-like beings?
I’ll let you wrestle with the larger question of how two seemingly contradictory ideas can be true since I can’t really answer that anyway. I’ll just tell you why I think each of those ideas is true. First the pond scum. Well, it’s actually quite literal in a way. Life on this planet started, as far as I know, in some sort of primordial soup. Billions of years ago, some slime in a tidal pool started to make copies of itself, yadda yadda yadda, and here we are: hence pond scum. Furthermore, I do believe we were some form of rodentia and some point. These are all things that we don’t treat with much respect to say the least, yet they are us. We also do god-awful things all the time. War, rape, murder, and taking advantage of people are all prevalent in the world. Humans have no limit of cruelty, sadism and selfishness: hence, immoral and debauched.
But we are also godly. We have the ability to create. We can tap into our vast, probably infinite, imaginations for ideas that we can then turn into reality; out of nothing, there is something. We have compassion, understanding, and empathy. We do selfless things: soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their friends, people give their lives to their children and to other people all the time. We create art and appreciate beauty. As far as we know we’re the only life in the universe and we are able to have understanding, to recognize patterns. We may be the sole manifestation of the universe trying to understand itself, and thus we represent a dawning magnificent awareness. We have unlimited potential for good as well. And we are, also quite literally, stardust. Our atoms were forged billions of years ago in celestial fusion reactors: hence godly and beautiful.
I hope I’ve successfully demonstrated that both of these ideas are in fact viable, and that they both could be true. But how can this be? How can we be both divine and profane? Perhaps humanity is a contronym, a word which is it’s own antonym, like awful. Humanity is awful: 1) Extremely bad or unpleasant; terrible 2) Filled with awe, especially filled with or displaying great reverence. If the word awful can be two things at once, why can’t we?
