Here are a few examples of what I will call ambivalence, which I also referred to earlier. It seems to be a feature of every society everywhere and always has been. It might be described as the conflict we have between what we believe, or what we think is right, or good, and how we behave.
Here are a few examples that come to my mind but this is by no means an exhaustive list.
We want our population to grow, we all want nice big spacious houses but we don’t want urban sprawl or we don’t want high-rise.
We permit the manufacture of cars/motorbikes that can go at 250km/hr but we don’t want our loved ones to die in car accidents.
We want clean air and water but we don’t want to give up the lifestyle that causes the air and water to be destroyed.
We want to drive in our cars to shop in big supermarkets but we don’t want our villages to be deserted.
We want to live longer and be paid pensions till we die but we don’t want to increase the age at which we retire.
We want to use email but we don’t want our small post offices to close and/or we increasingly use internet banking but we don’t want banks in small towns to close.
We want to buy on line but we don’t want small local shops to close.
We want to be fit and healthy and we want to eat rubbish and live a sedentary lifestyle.
We want our privacy to be respected but we embrace social media with great enthusiasm.
We want to upload our pictures, films, vidoes etc. on the cloud but we don’t want data centres to be using massive amounts of energy.
We want our children to be safe but we daren’t censor or even speak out against gratuitously violent or sexually explicit images that flood our media to saturation.
We want our children to grow up drug free but we allow very subtle, powerful and attractive advertisements promoting alcohol, aimed at young people, to be shown on television at all times of day and night.
We want our children to grow up drug free but we allow alcohol manufacturers pour huge amounts of money into the sponsorship of sports, the very activities that, we hope, will be attractive to young people.
We want our children to grow up healthy but we permit the advertising of sugar high foods that not only put children at risk of obesity but are proven to be addictive in nature.
We don’t want our children to die in war but we continue to enjoy the profits made from development and sale of arms and weapons.
(Linked to last one). We continually state that we abhor violence but we have used it to sort out problems as long as history has been written. (See this Sub-Chapter).
Can you think of more?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I thought about the above examples a little.
Why do we behave thus? What drives us to choose things that are bad for us, even when we are aware of their harmful consequences?
While I attribute our apparently contradictory behaviour to corporate-closedness in another part of the blog, I intuit that that is a cause that is nearest to the effect, and there are probably deeper reasons why ambivalence is so embedded in our psyche.