The nausea of existing and the yin-yang

“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been”. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 14th century, attributed to Luo Guanzhong.

Humans become sick of everything. That is the tragicomic pendulum of the human temperament.

We become sick of chaos. We become sick of lies. We become sick of order. We become sick of truth. It is the existential nausea.

We become sick of choosing, we become sick of being told what to choose. We become sick of thinking, and we become sick of delegating it to the group. We become sick of high impact collectivities and low impact individuals, and we become sick of the opposite. We become sick of boredom, and we become sick of fun. We become sick of our loved ones, and we become sick of ourselves. We become sick of unity, and we become sick of division. Thus is the human heart.

And that is one of the reasons why at the scale of the masses, of societies, states, geopolitical orders, the pendulum swings from creation to destruction and back again. A few people might learn to manage their own inherent fickleness through hard-won wisdom, virtue, and self-awareness, but at a collective scale disorder born from generalised existential nausea is bound to eventually erupt.

We even become sick of this swinging pendulum, and even of the balance between creation and destruction that a golden age might reach.

This is a phenomenon that humanity has realised millennia ago and pops up in its multiple incarnations in mythology, religions, literature, and philosophy. It is beautifully rounded up in the concept of the yin and yang: each opposite contains the seed of the other, and their interlocking creates a single whole. When we become sick of the pendulum itself, we are still trapped in the cycle of a greater yin and yang, our pendulum being but the yang of another yin. The infinity of the yin and yang is that each of these single wholes are the opposite of yet another single whole, forming an infinite series of fractal repetition as we zoom out.

What can we do about this? Do we despair at the inevitable arrival of destruction? Do we use our understanding of this expression of human fickleness so that we take measures to prevent it?

I think the latter is a reasonable approach, wisdom is one of the paths towards that state of things, along with culture, institutions, technologies, arts, and such. Yet, it is also wise to learn to nimbly adapt to both chaos and order, and carefully embrace them as we might our suppressed emotions, because within chaos there is always the seed of order, and chaos itself belongs to a greater order, as it is the yang within a greater yin and yang.

So it might be true that we are fickle and eventually become sick of everything and anything. But there is also hope in each cycle of destruction and rebirth: we seek the seeds of new order within that destruction, and we take a step back to understand how this particular cycle of destruction fits in the greater cycles of human history (or perhaps better said, the cycles of human fickleness). In the same way, we find hope in the seeds of necessary chaos that a stifling order harbours.

Sometimes we find hope in the novel, and sometimes in the recovery of the old and disregarded, ready to re-emerge in a renewed form. And we do not restrain our ability to imagine a better order by fearing the loss of the current one, because this very loss is part of the order and balance of a greater cycle.

It might be that a most important element to keep in mind is that these cycles are what make the universe dynamic and vibrate with the excitement of existence. All engaging stories deep down dwell in the cycles of order and chaos, and we consume them with ever-renewing thirst. This is because it is the primordial source of change; the seeds ripen, and the wheel turns with each turn of the cycle, and stories, history, societies, groups, our personal lives, move towards new and fresh states of being.

And it might also be that the most we can do with the inevitability of orders collapsing is to not suppress this turn of the wheel with excessive might, lest chaos will bounce back with even greater destruction. Instead, we accept the wave of transition as it comes, and we make sure that love, even as the faintest spark, remains an ideal that we cannot fully abandon.

That is another reality of the human heart: even though we might be sick of it, love can endure. It can leave our hearts but be quick to come back, as long as we are open to it, every time we give it or receive it. This is perhaps, when everything else could be lost, the first thing that must remain.

To go even further, love could be the third element that disrupts the cycle of order and chaos, remaining external to it and bathing it in a kind of elemental goodness instead of despairing destruction, for chaos does not need to be despairing, nor utterly destructive -at least where human will has a say. It can be loving chaos and destruction, akin to a child throwing a tantrum.

I think we ought to cherish this fickleness, and learn to relate to it as we would to a difficult friend. Just as our capacity to not forget love, fickleness is an expression of our freedom. There is no order of things that can determine forever how we will do things, we will always find a way to not be content and create something new, or recover the old and abandoned and bring it back in renewed form.

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