Let's invite the enemy we fear to dine, then, and rescue ourselves from irrational conflict.
After all, learning to relate authentically in our personal relationships is the first step to resolving irrational conflict all around the world.
The rational and irrational are in conflict at every level, and language and imagery are haunted by death and entropy.
Just as Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery or House cures a patient, the journalist (and thus we when we read them) processes a stream of arbitrary, conflicting, irrational, and complicated stimuli and turns it into order.
Moreover, if people would only drop their appeals to revelation – which conflict, are irrational, and have a marked tendency towards violence – then perhaps the world would become a more peaceful place.
But the "things that bind us together", as Fraser puts it, can also be the source of irrational beliefs and intercommunal conflict, as the history of religion amply demonstrates.
According to psychological monism, motivational conflict and irrational action do not result from a 'struggle' between the rational and the non-rational aspects of the soul; what we call irrational must be understood as (bad) states of the rational soul.
Such an essentialist account of real and irrational numbers seems to conflict with the actual freedom mathematicians have to extend and invent, with Wittgenstein's intermediate claim (PG 334) that "[f]or [him] one calculus is as good as another," and with Wittgenstein's acceptance of complex and imaginary numbers.
I had never seen such a direct infusion of religion in politics, which has very dangerous potential because it introduces a new irrational element to the conflict.
As one commentator aptly puts it, "on the one hand, poetry promotes intrapsychic conflict; on the other, it keeps us unconscious of that conflict, for the irrational part of our psyche cannot hear reason's corrections.
In the aftermath of the first world war, American elites were aghast at all the irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict – the xenophobia, the racism, the urge to lynch and riot.
