Paradox & Paradigm: Humanity’s Righteous Reigns

There are many names – some fancy, others plain, some profound, others vacuous – for the new paradigm many, especially our youth, say is rapidly approaching. Elsewhere herein, I proclaim to have the goods.

Here though, let me introduce, with an important bit of context, the least pretentious, most factually accurate name for the paradigm being (re)packaged in the streets as we speak. The important context? I myself am a deeply unpretentious, factually accurate person (feel the cringe? that’s foreshadowing). You see, we are entering

The Reign of Paradox Paradigm

Consider now Pandora’s Box. The mythical story of the dangers of removing the lid, uncorking the vessel, on humanity’s self-important, missive emotionality, or to use the succinct yet dismissive phrase, irrationality.

In the Reign of Paradox Paradigm, humanity embraces its own knowledge of itself to reign its righteous outrage back from the paradoxical precipice of mutual self-destruction.

One interpretation, distinctly masculine and objectifying of Pandora herself, goes as such… (in early versions, the box was typically a vessel)….

In a jar an odious treasure is
Shut by the gods’ wish:
A gift that’s not everyday,
The owner’s Pandora alone; 
And her eyes, this in hand,
Command the best in the land 
As she flits near and far; 
Prettiness can’t stay
Shut in a jar.
Someone took her eye, he took
A look at what pleased her so
And out came the grief and woe
We won‘t ever be rid of,
For heaven had hidden
That in the jar.

Isaac de Benserade’s invocation of the pandora dilemma in his 1676 version of OVID’s Metamorphoses

I submit that, in reigning in the old, we recognize the grief, the woes, the irrational, are not a tool for Pandora, to threaten or guilt mankind into submission to her wants.

Rather, those woes hidden are the grief of submitting rationality to the unifying truth that paradox – not man, not woman, not place, not currency, not science, not religion – holds the reigns over creation. In this, we can embrace a truly righteous orientation to all of creation.

– ma-McGee, July 2022