The more I am involved with social problems and the problems of social structure, the more I conclude that there are no workable answers.  Take the issue of freedom and order, for example.

     There are permissive societies that stress individual liberty, and they are typically crime-ridden.  Let people do whatever they want, and they will.  And what they want to do often violates the desires and needs of others.

     So, we place limits on individual freedom, to protect us from each other and to establish public order.  Unfortunately, this often seems such a good idea that more and more freedoms are sacrificed, until, eventually, we have created a repressive society.  Then, either peacefully or not peacefully, we move back to a state of individual liberty, with it's attendant problems.

     We often observe the pendulum swings in such matters, reflected in a great many subject matters.  Neither extreme seems to work.  Nor, annoyingly, does some "golden mean" between those extremes.   With all due apologies to Aristotle and to the Buddah, the middle road doesn't seem offer enough of either polar quality to be satisfying.  In the case of freedom, we resent the limits on our freedoms and those limits don't produce enough social order.

     Perhaps our purpose is to deal with such dilemmas.  Perhaps the grappling is what it's all about.  Maybe we are supposed to learn that neither extreme works, nor does the middle road.  We could have read it in a book, but this way we get to visit earth.
 
 

Written  7/10/95
(c) 1999  Earl Babbie