The Conservative Cat

Nowadays, when people hear the word dialectic, they think of Karl Marx's dialectic materialism, but real dialectics had its origins in ancient Greece. The more recent invention, due to Georg Hegel, was the use of the three terms thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to describe stages of the progression toward perfect understanding. The thesis and antithesis appear to be contradictory. The synthesis represents a compromise between the two views that incorporates what is true in both. Because the process is always moving to a greater understanding, there's a perfect understanding waiting in the distance, the transcendentalism on which Hegel based his ideas.

In the conservative world of trial and error, there is no perfection, ever: you're always going to be stumbling across new problems that need new approaches. Because there is never going to be perfection, an imperfect solution is acceptable. Looking at the world through the lens of The Dialectic, liberals do not see the need to settle for an imperfect solution. So, because neither oil nor nuclear energy is perfect, liberals see nothing illogical about opposing them even though there is no alternative anywhere on the horizon. They know that alternative has to be out there, because that's the way their world works.

Dialectical materialism applies Hegel's search for understanding to the interaction between social groups. In Marx's model, however, the two groups were asymmetric: the thesis group had the power, and the antithesis group had the problems. The synthesis was always achieved by taking from the thesis and giving to the antithesis. In other words, there is always a way to resolve conflict by screwing the rich people. It doesn't matter if it's war, education, or economics: if the antithesis is unhappy, the only possible explanation is that the thesis hasn't given enough.

Barack Obama is the human incarnation of this Marxist pattern of thought. It doesn't matter that he's inexperienced, because you don't need experience to make Haves give stuff to the Have-Nots, you just need power (preferably power without constitutional limits). Best of all, he is part of America's unique antithesis-- the African-American-- and therefore the standards applied to other candidates axiomatically do not apply to him.

Ultimately, dialectic thought fails because, as you can see from the diagram, there is no provision for testing its conclusions against reality. If something goes wrong, it's a new antithesis, and fixing it will come from making another step forward, not from going back and trying a different direction. It's a simple, unidirectional philosophy for a very complicated, multidirectional world.

It would be a real good idea to vote against it this Tuesday.

Respectfully submittted,

Ferdinand T. Cat