There are conceptual forces that are pushing and pulling constantly, forces that take on moral weight in their battles against each other. One person’s good change is another person’s evil sameness. One universal notion explodes into specificities that cannot be translated under a different lens. For one corporate chief, their domain is a libertarian paradise. For a middle management apparatchik in the same domain, life is lived in a communist dictatorship that accepts no dissent. The lovers of universal sameness cannot abide changes because their situation seems perfect and their perfect situation seems to represent the perfection of the whole world (see the above corporate winner). These victorious champions of conservation and the paradise that has arrived are Popes. To believe in the specificity of experience and don’t mind if things stay the same is a strange group; a set of mystic, not quite Buddhist followers of Zhuangzi, these seers of difference can’t see anything as better than anything else. We’ll call these adaptive non-interferers Crows (bring on the city, they eat trash as readily as nuts). Next we have the two lovers of change: Idealists and Caregivers.
Idealists need the whole world to be different according to universal principles. Caregivers don’t pay too much attention to the whole world, they are focused on making the small amount that they can see better. Both Idealists and Caregivers cannot stand either Popes or Crows. The Popes sit on top of morally bankrupt institutions with harmful principles while hurting specific people and the Crows are apathetic scavengers that only avoid the “sociopath” designation because they are mostly neutral to the people around them. Wittgenstein was a born Pope who wanted to become a Caregiver, but contented himself with Crow-hood most of the time. A philosophy that rejected the universality of language (and therefore the possibility of philosophy) had to live on the contextual side, and giving away his inherited fortune was a move to scorn the Popes in his family. His one-time mentor and most-times friend Bertrand Russell was the picture of an Idealist: against war of all types and believing fervently in mathematical logic.
Crows don’t much care if anyone else holds their views. Popes would prefer everyone believe what they believe without taking any of their power. Caregivers are concerned that most people are too callous and inattentive (not to mention academic). Idealists are blinded by their belief that most people (aside from their partisans) are idiots and possibly evil (though their universal principles often indicate quite differently).
The incompatibility of each archetype results in loud arguments, particularly in arms-length digital arenas. No recommendations for reconciliation are forthcoming from this seat on a telephone wire; this Crow will remain cawing at the passers by and waiting for cars to crack open these walnuts.
Roman Ryan 