Part 3' The Imperfect Perfection

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Part 3. The Imperfect Perfection

• Components of Ideological Realities
• Written by Paul Watzlawick
• View the VIDEO by Dr. Mo Al-Ubaydli
• characteristics of the reality that emerges
  when there is conviction that the final true
  explanation has been found.

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Mo Al-Ubaydli
Paul Watzlawick
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(No Transcript)
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• . Name Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
• Profession MD
• Affiliation The Advisory Board Company
• Interest Anything Watzlawick writes
• Question What kind of reality is
• constructed when one
  assumes
• one has found an ideology
  with
• which to view the world?

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The Pseudo-Divine Origins of Ideology

• Because the cosmic order is incomprehensible to
  the average man, an ideology is all the more
  convincing the more it relies upon an unusual,
  superhuman, or at least brilliant originator.

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The Assumed PsychologicalNecessity of Ideology

• It is perhaps a waste of time to say anything at
  all about why an ultimate world view is so
  crucially important to us. We human beings and -
  as the modern study of primates demonstrates -
  the other higher mammals appear to be
  psychologically unable to survive in a universe
  without meaning and order. Thus it follows that
  there is a need to fill the vaccum, for this
  vaccum it its more diluted form can drive us to
  boredom, and it its most concentrated form to
  psychosis or suicide. But when so much is at
  stake, the interpretation of the world must be
  invulnerable and must not leave any quetions
  unanswered.

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The Paradoxes of Eternal Values

• Every ideology's claim to finality unavoidably
  leads to a paradox that has been known in formal
  logic for millenia. This paradox, however,
  enables the conceptual system to resolve even the
  greatest contradictions with no apparent effort.
  It concerns the introduction of zero or infinity
  into mathematical equations and its results.

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The Paradoxes of Eternal Values

• Every ideology's claim to finality unavoidably
  leads to a paradox that has been known in formal
  logic for millenia. This paradox, however,
  enables the conceptual system to resolve even the
  greatest contradictions with no apparent effort.
  It concerns the introduction of zero or infinity
  into mathematical equations and its results.

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The Paradoxes ofPerfection and Infinity

• As audacious and powerful as the sublime
  philosophical edifice may be, as much as it may
  appear to be an iron-clad system, it nevertheless
  has a fatal flaw It cannot prove its own logic
  and freedom from contradiction from within itself.

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Heresy and Paranoia

• It follows from the assumption of a universally
  valid ideology, just as night follows day, that
  other positions are heresy. The word hairesis
  originally did not mean heresy at all but,
  rather, choice, that is a condition in which one
  can choose.

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The Paradox of Demanded Spontaneity

• The pressing, essentially unanswered question of
  how the weakness and sinfulness of man can be
  brought into harmony with the demands of a pure
  faith crosses all major religions, but especially
  Christian ethics.

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The Claim to Scientificity

• With the growing trust in a total comprehension
  of reality on the basis of objective observations
  and experiments that can be repeated, science
  began to fill the ideological vaccum which in the
  last hundred years gradually developed through
  the fading of the great religious, ethical, and
  philosophical ideals.

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Enantiodromy

• Since Heraclitus, the great philosopher of
  change, we understand enantiodromy as the
  transition of things into their opposite.