Inflated Opposites — How the Center Collapses
“The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.” — Plotinus
I understand the intent behind many of today’s cultural diagnoses. There is genuine desire from all sides to heal the crisis we find ourselves in before it collapses us further. But these takes keep circling the same shallow drains, leaving us thirsty for a cure.
If you want to truly heal, you need to prioritize depth over division.
It’s women. It’s patriarchy.
It’s wokeness. It’s capitalism.
It’s Communism. It’s Nazism.
It’s Muslims. It’s Christians.
It’s Black culture. It’s White supremacy.
Whenever anyone points to these as the root cause of our civilizational malaise, they are showing you they haven’t understood the actual root at all.
You can’t fix downstream without addressing upstream.
And that’s all these divisions do. They flatten the vertical back into the horizontal. The transcendent function gets buried under “factors” identified as the culprit by the one-sided diagnoses. And that’s how the hierarchy of causation becomes both-sides fodder that feeds the 21st century’s God: the Algorithm.
Anyone who has genuinely tried to understand human behavior eventually encounters this truth:
The psyche has an architecture.
Jung, Eliade, Maslow, and others mapped it extensively. What they found is that the human psyche is structured for transcendence. Built into it is a need for connection to something beyond, an understanding of one’s place not just on Earth, but in the Cosmos.
MEANING.
So what happens when you remove what served this function?
For millennia, religion played this role. It wasn’t perfect. Far from it. But it addressed the transcendent need of the soul. And that matters.
Our ancestors lived under objectively worse material conditions: plague, famine, brutal labor, early death. And yet, no epidemic of suicide, no mass addiction crisis, no civilizational-scale meaninglessness.
Why?
Because they had cosmological placement. Their suffering was situated within a larger order. (See Frankl to understand the true power of meaning.)
If you remove that — any system connecting human beings to something deeper than flesh — a vacuum is created. That vacuum becomes fertile ground for ideology. For pathology. For filling the void with politics, tribalism, consumption, rage.
Mechanics. Not morality.
Truth is descriptive, narrative prescriptive.
It’s not that women are doing this or men are doing that. There are no opposites that don’t mirror each other.
Anyone who takes such a stark side, by blaming one sex, one group, one-ism, is missing the forest for the trees. And in their confusion, they confuse others, too. They tragically perpetuate the very disease they want to heal.
As the spirit of Hippocratic wisdom puts it:
“Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that make him sick.”
Because the truth is —
You cannot heal what you do not understand.
And our civilization depends on you & me understanding.
Ontological truth.
The mechanics beneath the moral noise.
Natural law doesn’t care about your morality any more than gravity cares about your opinions.
These opposites we are witnessing are enantiodromia in action: extreme positions on both poles.
Heraclitus talked about this fact of natural law — how one extreme side will always constellate its opposite. And Jung, of course, talked about this extensively and broke it down in psychological terms.
When the centre collapses, the poles burn it down together.
“The way up and the way down are one and the same.” — Heraclitus
Natural law.
Two poles — left and right — fight each other mercilessly throughout eternity.
Two inflated opposites.
Mirror images.
Two sides of the same coin.
As Jung wrote in The Red Book, “Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love.”
The poles don’t just oppose each other. They actually require each other to exist in their extreme form. Without the demonized enemy — the scapegoat for shadow projection — each pole’s inflated self-righteousness collapses.
Opposites. Mirrors.
Who benefits from the division and disease?