Paradoxes are needed
March 26, 2010

“Son of man”, Magritte. I hate Magritte. When I look to one of his works I feel a pain in my throat and I can’t breath. I think that it is because its picture are visual and effective paradoxes for my mind.
I feel that paradoxes are the key for changing our point of view, maybe we have the delusion of been comfortable but a nasty paradox make our position uncomfortable. Of course many reasonings are not paradox, they are simply some trap of natural language or not mathematical developed skills. I will do some positive example:
- Voting Paradox (Democracy sucks). Comment: “What? You guy are a nazi and forget all the people died for your freedom!”, maybe the reader is not so trivial but this is an example of uncomfortable sentence that I think is true, for example in Italy a law was approved 160 votes against 155. I do not think it is fair.
- Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Comment: What if police itself do crimes? It seems that the keeper logic has some point of weakness, after all.
- The end of complaining. Comment: Did you notice? You may invent some time saving technology, save the world, end a war and… someone will complain. But there is something more profound in that paradox, that is things, uses, prices (I imagine an office and a marketing guy that is deciding the price of a new XYZ product. He starts from 1000 euros and imagine what happen if XYZ costs that price…), thinkings will always set to a minimum level of complaining. Think to that, economist.
Can we define a paradox? I think it is as difficult as defining the verb to be
I love Magritte, for the exact same reason that makes you hate him.