Charles Simeon, the nineteenth-century cleric and fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, put it well when he said of mercy and justice: “Truth is not in the middle and not in one extreme; it is in both extremes.” G. K. Chesterton, the English essayist, expressed a similar idea when he defined paradox as “two opposite cords of truth [that have] become entangled in an inextricable knot.
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False dichotomies are undisciplined thought. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Builders of greatness are comfortable with paradox. They don’t oppress themselves with what we call the “Tyranny of the OR,” which pushes people to believe that things must be either A OR B, but not both. Instead, they liberate themselves with the “Genius of the AND.” Undisciplined thinkers force debates into stark “Tyranny of the OR” choices; disciplined thinkers expand the conversation to create Genius of the AND solutions.
In their training, therapists learn that common sense is not always useful in counseling others. Human life is full of paradoxes and contradictions.
This contrariness is one of the tools I use regularly. I not only consider an opposite position on stories and their interpretations, I usually present my contrary view. My clients are so used to me offering an alternative to their well-reasoned explanations that after they finish telling me what they think, they wait expectantly for me to contradict them. I do this somewhat in a spirit of fun and openness, even though the matter may be deadly serious. I’m not criticizing my clients; I’m playfully giving them my accustomed and often cherished alternative version.
Most sacred literature suggests that the opposites that make life so interesting and painful cannot be resolved intellectually. You have to find some other means of getting differences in one place and letting them coexist or blend.
For nearly all of history, there have been two kinds of authority taking the big decisions affecting people’s lives. There is a fundamental distinction between ‘kings’ and ‘priests’. A king might be more powerful, but his orders can be argued against – it might be inadvisable to do so, but if you can change the king’s mind you can change the decision. The priest, on the other hand, gains his authority from his status as the interpreter of the Word of God, so his decisions are considerably more difficult to reverse. This means that it matters a great deal which kinds of decisions are giving to which kinds of authorities, and the question of the boundary between the two spheres has often been one of the central issues of entire eras — it was the subject of the Thirty Years War in Europe. A lot of the discontent in the modern world might come from having taken decision-making structures that were designed with ‘king-like’ leaders in mind, and handing them over to managers who didn’t act in the same way.