Hope - Alex Wyllie

The question of what is good and what is bad is as old as humanity itself. We have always seen conflict, in how we worship our gods, in how we structure our societies. The ancient gods of the Greeks warred with their predecessors, the Titans, the leader of whom, killed his own father, and all was born from chaos. And without Chaos, there is no such thing as order, and so all was indeed born from chaos. Even today, we struggle to define good and evil, our models of the universe account for one and not the other. But how, we ask, does one exist without the other, and why, we ask, do both exist and not neither and not more? 

We live in a world where wars rage and politicians battle, surrounded by the ever-present threats of nuclear war, climate change, and disaster. We live in a world where Pandora’s box has released all imaginable sins, disasters and whatever else would constitute a God’s wrath. We live in a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy is ever-increasing. We live in a world that’s problems seem to increase every day, conflicts are spawned and intensified, a world where people starve, living in poverty, fearing drought, fearing floods, infected with lethal diseases. We live in a world where now, more than ever, people live in suffering. Our world is unforgiving and far more dangerous than we like to think. Our romanticized thoughts have forgotten that Mother Nature is no caregiver, but rather an abusive mother who in her own efforts to protect herself, seeks to wipe us, her greatest disease, from existence.

But we aren’t evil. We have hope. We who pray for rain, we who pray for the harvest, we who toil endlessly to provide for ourselves, to provide for nature, to survive. We are not good either, we who poison ourselves, our environment, and destroy our world. We are simply doing what the inherent natural laws of our universe tell us to do. When view this way, there is no good, no evil, not even a grey area in between, but instead, conflicts. Conflicts in nature, conflicts in society, conflicts in people. Conflict is not good, nor is it bad, nor anything in between. Conflict, like our universe, simply is.

Conflict, like a paradox, has no good answer, no bad answer. Instead, we have two answers, neither of which is right, but also neither of which can be wrong. You can’t be wrong without there being a right. And if there were a right, there would be no conflict, no paradox. The only difference between a conflict and a paradox is that in conflict, it is necessary, by the very nature of conflict, that the two sides insist that they are right. And there is no escaping the conflict, for as Horace said, “they who rush across the sea change in not mind nor heaven.” It persists, and it pervades.

Stock markets, economies, politics, and indeed, questions themselves, exemplify the very nature of conflict as it surrounds us like the cloak of death. But fear not, for we will always have hope.