She's what you could call a "contrarian." "You're a loner, just like me," she had said the day they left Kingston. That stuck in his mind because it was true. But what she meant by it was not just someone who's alone, but a contrarian, someone who's always doing everything the wrong way, just out of pure willfulness, it would seem.
Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral pattern they can find. It seems as though they're trying to destroy morality as a kind of revenge. He'd gotten that word out of his anthropology reading. It indicated there's more to contrarians than just individual "wrongness." It's common to many cultures. That *brujo *in Zuni was a contrarian. The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric. Cheyenne contrarians rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward, and had a whole repertoire of things they performed in a contrary way. Members seemed to enter the contrary society when they felt a great wrong, a great injustice, had been done to them and apparently it was felt that this was a way of resolving the injustice. Once you see it in another culture like that and then come back to our own you can see that in an unofficial way we have our contrarian societies too. The "Bohemians" of the Victorian era were contrarians. So, to some extent, were the Hippies of the sixties. Anyway it seemed to him that when you add a concept of "Dynamic Quality" to a rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. Some of them aren't just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a Dynamic goal. Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they're supposed to be doing, that's the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it's a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it's an ego pattern that says, "I'm too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff." Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its own. This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can't get off and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you and devours you. The degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way. Drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like. But sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That's what drives the really creative people-the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like-the feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody has built around them, they're going to die. But they're not being contrary in a way that is just decadent. They're way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They're fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns. But the Dynamic freedom they're fighting for is a kind of morality too. And it's a highly important part of the overall moral process. It's often confused with degeneracy but it's actually a form of moral regeneration. Without its continual refreshment static patterns would simply die of old age. And Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know? Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
