He seems to have no problem reconciling stolen cable TV with his biblical beliefs. Hmmm … I thought to myself that a contradiction’s first cousin must be hypocrisy. When I asked him about it, he laughed it off by saying “Hey, it’s not costing anybody.” As many as needed, as often as necessary.įor example, I have a neighbor who grabs opportunities to preach about the Bible, yet he pirates a TV cable signal to watch his favorite shows. If, or when, our self-contradictions are exposed, we try to shield ourselves with self-rationalizations. For instance, it’s perfectly OK for us to refute someone else’s god or deity, yet we’re deeply insulted if they refute ours. So we instinctively go on the offensive against other people’s contradictions. We’re more ashamed or in denial about our self-contradictions. It also shouldn’t be confused with a paradox, which appears to be self-contradictory but actually reveals a hidden truth. Yet in the theater of the human mind, we somehow manage to stage this performance on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, depending on our whims.Ī contradiction should not be confused with an oxymoron, such as “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly.” It’s more personal than mere wordplay. Which do you value more - politics or honesty, money or morals, ideology or facts? Do they mesh or clash in conflict?Īccording to my dictionary, a contradiction is the logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. We’ve been attempting this since childhood, possibly since we first struggled to merge Jesus Christ and Santa Claus into a tidy holiday, for example.Īs we aged, we’ve struggled to merge a long list of “-isms,” including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, consumerism, capitalism and Catholicism, to name a few. It’s the attempted unification of religions, cultures, politics and schools of thought.
There’s a word for this experience - syncretism. Otherwise, we would have to deal with the consequences of our conflicting beliefs, habits, morals and daily decisions. We conveniently ignore many of them to keep us sane, others to make us feel smarter than we actually are. Our lives are littered with self-contradictions, though we prefer to keep them hidden.
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