The Dialectic

"The wreckers against the builders! That's the whole story of life."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

There are those who build things up: systems, physical surroundings, ideas, legacies, and their fellow man. There are also those who make it their purpose to tear these things apart, and they've become quite adept at doing so in an efficient manner. They have also succeeded at marketing their tearing down of things in such a way as to convince a good number of the builders that they would be better off to defect from their business of creating. Destruction is, after all, far more palatable than construction. The fall is more entertaining than the climb.

This is the essence of man. It always has been and it always will be.

Choose.

Humanity has a way of engineering its own end more efficiently than any god or devil ever could. We build great and wonderful things only to drive them into the ground in the name of excess and progress. This plays out on a grand level, of course, with companies, communities, and complete civilizations inescapably falling in an ascending and subsequently descending line.

It is important to understand, however, that the building and wrecking dialectic is not only the worry of humanity, as a body, but more practically the worry of humans as individual aspects of the human whole. This rise and fall happens not only on obviously grand social levels, but also (and perhaps more importantly) on the level of the individual.

So, again, choose. But choose first in your own life how and what you'll build and wreck before you go and worry about which role you'll fill on any higher level of society.

Einstein once said that we "cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." Likewise, we cannot choose to both build and wreck and expect to be any good, or to have an impact, at either.

I, of course, would encourage you to try and be a better builder than you will be a wrecker. In the case that you absolutely must wreck something, however, please don't do anything too amazingly harmful. We're killing ourselves quickly enough, thank you. Speeding up the process any more would simply be excessive.

Stay Gold.

MMK