Balance

Without the capacity to be cruel, kindness means nothing. Without the ability to hate intensely and passionately, love means nothing. Without the ability to destroy, the power to create will choke on itself. Without the ability to kill, you cannot give rise to new life and without the ability to punish, the ability to reward transmutes from real generosity to disguised cowardice.

Life is contrast and polarity. The average will never work. It the greyness that marks the beginning of the end. The slow decay of a civilization. Balance is not grey – it is not the average.

It is the managed-conflict between the extremes – an active balance that finds its centre against external disturbances, the balance that strengthens itself from attack, the balance that turns suffering, pain and difficulty into a tool to strengthen itself, the balance that uses cold water to grow sharper in the forge of life under the hammer of self-imposed discipline, it is this active balance between the polarities that distinguishes the alive from the dead.

Growth happens at the extremes, never in the middle. Buddha was wrong! The middle-path is cancer, diabetes, cardio, “work-life balance”, depression and anxiety, mass-media, common-sense, healthy food, consumerism, the free-market and modern medicine. Be poor, be rich, whatever you do, don’t be middle-class. Live, or die, don’t grind through a declining and grey existence. If you are a man, aim for everything, or nothing. The professors were wrong, small drops will never make an ocean. It is violent and total cataclysms that do it. Don’t endure disrespect and grind through a sub-optimal situation. Burn it all down and start again. When you are winning, you will know it.