After I spent five decades or so on Earth, I started to notice a curious thing. Humans, life, nature, maybe everything, seems to strive towards balance. You get +2 on one side of the divide, and what to you do, some other process pops up to counter it with just about -2 on the other side of the divide. The greater the extremes, the more radical measures are implemented to keep them in place. You get +200 on one side of the divide and at first, life is confused. It tries different ways to counteract it, -2, -25, -50, but none of this really works. Somehow life or the mind figures out that the only way to counteract a +200 is with a -200.
+2 + -2 = 0
+200 + -200 = 0
I kept seeing this over and over and it made me wonder. What’s so great about zero. We non-mathematicians in Late Capitalism regard zero with disdain. Why would anyone try for that. At worst it’s awful and at best it’s just middling to mediocre. You ever see someone jumping up and down yelling, “I’m a zero!” Of course not. So why the constant drive towards zero? I am thinking maybe the zero is an illusion. It’s not really zero. Maybe it’s stasis or harmony or peace and end to oppositions or something of that nature. The opposing forces have canceled each other out, and now we can kick back and enjoy, or deal, or whatever.
This “strive towards balance” which I still do not understand, seems to be the goal of most human psychological mechanisms and interactions with other humans. We’re all trying for the zero, the sweet spot. Not too much and not too little. Just right. Call it harmony. This drive in humans is so strong and seems to be so strongly reflected in actual natural processes themselves (the balance of nature) that one wonders if there is any universal drive or theory driving at least all living things: it is simply the drive for some sort of harmony or balance.
And this interminable and unstoppable and seemingly rooted in the universe incessant and insistent drive for harmony or balance may itself be the closest thing to what to the Holy Grail of the Physicists:
The Unifying Theory
I would add that this physicists’ holy grail, the “unifying theory” is also what drives all religion, philosophy, and art. I once characterized the goals of all human scholarly and artistic endeavors in all of the sciences, social and physical and all of the arts, as:
The Search for the Perfect Relationship
And I am thinking just now that the Search for the Perfect Relationship and the Unifying Theory have some relationship to each other. Either they are the same thing or the one is the search for the other, or the quest is the goal and vice versa. A lot more thinking to do on that one.
Over and out. Over and over and out.