Look at the picture. It is not either rabbit or duck. It’s both rabbit and duck. The teacher showing this to students for the first time welcomes a little debate, and plays a role to enlighten whoever said duck, to see the rabbit as well. And for those who saw the rabbit, the teacher points out how to see the duck.
As this is the case with the duck and the rabbit, so is the case with other points of view: Tomayto-tomahto, Capitalism-Socialism, glass half full-glass half empty. While people develop their ideas and may hold two different beliefs, there still exists the underlying picture from which they emerged.
There have always been people. And the picture of people is an incredibly complex landscape of dynamic behaviors, emotions, thoughts. What’s true for one is not true for another. We get paradoxes like Oscar Wilde captures. “Take what you have gathered from coincidence,” Bob Dylan
But people don’t change that much. 400 years later, we can still laugh and cry at Shakespeare’s work. The behavior of people still lurks beneath our art and social structures (capitalism/socialism), but now we have different tools of analysis and language to display and interpret the people.
As different views have developed, there still exists the thing (perhaps the raw data) from which the views are collected.
Polarity is the consequence when any party neglects to see the irony.
A person in the room who sees one view, while everyone else sees the other, is motivated to develop an even stronger voice to clearly identify his view. If there’s one person in the room who sees the duck, and everyone else sees the rabbit, then the person who sees the duck must maintain even stronger the existence of the duck and work heavily to point it out clearly. This can spiral out of control, in a need for “more”, producing all kinds of obsessive behaviors.
Once the duck and rabbit are made aware to both parties, the views are common knowledge. If someone in the room says, “It’s a rabbit,” the sentence carries with it an intrinsic irony as everybody knows the existence of the two animals, but now this voice is ironically saying one with the intentional dismissal of the other.
Knowledge is moot. People can come to know almost anything. With this ease, we can assume everyone in the room is aware of the existence of both sides of the story. Any championing of one over another as “correct” is no longer guided by an intention of enlightenment, but is a statement that carries with it the knowledge of both’s existence, and, with irony, claims one thing while simultaneously dismissing the other.
The sky is blue.
Society is Capitalist.
Today is Wednesday.
There is a god.
The picture is a rabbit.