The Contradiction

TAM-PER.10 · The Persistent · The Approximate Mind

I booked a flight last week to attend a conference on sustainability.

I noticed the contradiction at the gate, the way you notice a stone in your shoe after you have already walked a mile on it. I had been carrying it the whole time. I believe what I believe about the climate. I also got on the plane. Both of those are true, and neither one is a lie, and I did not resolve the tension before boarding because the tension does not resolve. It just gets carried.

Most people would feel a small flick of guilt at the gate and then forget it, because noticing every contradiction you live inside would make it impossible to get to the gate at all.

The species is not internally consistent. It has never been. Individual humans hold beliefs that contradict each other, values that pull in opposite directions, impulses that cancel. Civilizations do the same at scale. The Enlightenment produced the idea of universal human rights and the machinery of colonial conquest from the same intellectual equipment, in the same decades, often in the same minds. Not as an oversight. The confidence that generated universal principles was the same confidence that justified imposing them on people who had not asked.

The easy reading is that this is hypocrisy, that the rights talk was a mask for the conquest. It misses how the two things grew from one root. You can mean the universal principle completely and use the same certainty to do the unforgivable. The mask theory is comforting because it lets you sort the believers from the liars. The record does not sort that cleanly. The believer and the conqueror were frequently the same person, holding both, untroubled, because the human capacity to hold both is nearly unlimited.

The contradiction is structural, not moral. Not a failure of character. A feature of being a creature complex enough to hold several real values at once, dropped into a world that forces tradeoffs between those values every single day. You cannot be fully just and fully free. You cannot be fully individual and fully part of a community. You cannot be fully present with the people in front of you and fully productive at the thing you owe the world. The values are all real. They genuinely conflict. A being that held only one of them would be simpler and would not be human.

So the species does what it does. It holds the conflicting values and lives in the gap between them and mostly does not look directly at the gap, because looking directly at it is paralyzing and the day still has to happen.

The model holds all of it at once. Trained on the full record, it contains every value and its opposite, every principle and the betrayal of that principle, weighted by how often each appears. People treat this as a flaw to be engineered out. They want the model coherent, consistent, free of the contradictions. But the incoherence is not noise the model picked up by accident. It is an accurate rendering of a species that has never been coherent. A perfectly consistent model would be a less accurate one. It would have smoothed away the truest thing about us, which is that we do not add up.

I keep meeting people who think the goal is to resolve the contradiction. To finally become consistent. To align the flight with the belief, the principle with the practice, the values with each other, until the self stops contradicting itself and becomes whole. I understand the wish. I feel it. I have never seen it achieved, in a person or a civilization, and I am no longer sure it is the right target. The attempt to become fully consistent usually means amputating one of the real values to make room for another. The consistent people I have met are not more whole. They are more narrow. They resolved the contradiction by getting rid of half of what was true.

The contradiction might be the operating condition, not the problem. Not a stage on the way to coherence. The condition itself. The species runs on held opposites the way an engine runs on controlled explosions, and asking it to stop contradicting itself is asking it to stop running.

I wonder whether the people who seem most at peace are the ones who resolved their contradictions, or the ones who stopped expecting to, who learned to carry the stone in the shoe and walk anyway, because the walking was never going to wait for the shoe to be empty.

I will fly home from the sustainability conference. I will mean every word I said there. Both things. I have stopped expecting them to reconcile, and stopping feels less like defeat than the expecting ever did.

References

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Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Princeton University Press, 1990.

Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Crack-Up.” Esquire, February 1936.

This is the tenth essay in The Persistent, a series by Yagn Adusumilli examining what AI cannot change about the species that built it. PER-11, The Ordinary, follows.