Climbing into my Ivory Tower

When I went out for Dinner with Peter a few weeks ago, he said something interesting. He was reading a novella that generally demonstrated how inequality of power is a necessary development in society, because it generates a group of people who have time to do things that aren't strictly related to survival, such as research, creating art and literature, formulating new philosophies, etc. In other words, if everyone was of uniform power standing, the world would be like a stagnant pond, no differentials in energy to produce useful work. He said also it's dangerous to think like this, because it could turn you into a conservative. =op

I think that bearing that in mind, it's also important to note that large disparities in power standing are equally dangerous. Just because you need a 5 Volt Potential difference to run a flashlight doesn't mean that hooking up 50KV to it will make it better. At some point the bulb will explode and you won't have a flashlight at all.

It really does seem that all is about balance. I've been thinking a lot lately about sociality balance. The balance between rebelling against all that is society in the name of individuality, and conforming to a mindless grey groupmass thought process. The sad state of affairs, I think, is that most people are sitting in one of those two camps, and I think like most things, the hardest thing to do is maintain the balance between them. The closer you get to being in one of the camps, the harder it is to move back to the middle again. I think there's great dangers to thinking in any extreme way, and that there are parts of each side that are appropriate for different circumstances.