There are two basic categories of thinkers participating here at ThinQon.  It’s easy to see that some of us get our ideas by examining the “outer” world, and some, perhaps a minority, the “inner.”  Some can cross the divide more easily than others, who are restricted to one side or the other .

Outer and Inner are in quotation marks because there use is metaphorical.  There is no actual dividing line; the border is wide and blurry.  Still, distinguishing the terms is useful.  And for clarity we should omit those who more readily cross over, limiting the discussion to the hypothetical extremes that spend their lives in a single land.

We look across the border with dismay, unable to fathom the customs of our neighbors.  Our diplomatic corps are of no use, we have no common ground, we respectively (sometimes with effort) consider our counterpoints naïve at best.

It’s curious that the two groups often align according to their political orientations: either Conservatives or Liberals.  The former valuing observations of the world, the later self-knowledge. 

Personally orientated toward the liberal/self knowledge pole, I find it next to impossible to fully appreciate the ideas of those who operate from the conservative/objective pole.  Valuable?  Of course.  It would be impossible to function as individuals or groups without objective knowledge. 

Again speaking for myself, I find that the views of my group’s counterparts often assign to their objective views a certainty that simply can only exist in a more introspective knowledge—derived from a “specious present.”  They seem unaware that the words they use have not the objective validity that they assign to them; that they are infinitely sub-divisible and at an atomic level are contradictory; that at the contradictory level all that is left is self-knowledge; that the relativism they decry in introspectives is in fact the quality of their own thought.

Conservatives, seekers and finders of objective knowledge please enlighten me.  I’ve heard enough of your views that dismiss mine, what may be more useful is some armistice, free trade between our nations.  I hope you are more successful than I am—frankly, you baffle me.  However it would please me greatly if you opened me to how you think and live.

This may be a polarity that we will never resolve.  The difference may exist forever, and in fact its existence may furnish the dialectic by which we develop, but without some understanding of the other we are doomed to the armed stalemate that characterizes our time.