The Anti-Human Age: Both Things Are True

 

“Discordantis In Crucem Sublatus (The Distracted Crucifixion)” by Jeremiah Strickland 

When I was thirty, I lived in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Early in the morning before work, when I wasn’t too hungover, I’d walk to the subway station where I could catch an R train toward Coney Island and transfer to the F. I’d get off at Brighton Beach, which I’d have almost entirely to myself at six o’clock in the morning. Living by the beach felt thrilling.

One morning, I waded into the Atlantic while the still-tired sun lounged on his orange horizon bed. It was early, even for the sun. The only other human in sight was fishing off the end of a jagged rock jetty maybe a quarter mile to my left. I jumped in and started swimming away from shore. The water was perfect. I felt great. When I was ready, I turned around to swim back to the beach.

I had to swim hard against the current. Push, I told myself, but I was getting nowhere. I rested for a moment, floating on my back, then rolled over and started swimming again. I looked to the jetty for reference. Still nowhere. I tried and rested. Tried and rested. The sun climbed the sky in its slow, steady way.

If I yelled out, would the fisherman hear me? Could he help me if he did? How? Maybe I could swim to the jetty and climb onto the rocks. Yeah, but the jetty was jagged as hell and probably surrounded by barnacles and heroin needles. Don’t panic. I wonder how deep it is here.

I took a deep breath and held my nose, preparing to drop beneath the waves. When I stood up, the water was only belly high. I laughed at myself and waded back to shore, awash in salt-laced relief. The first thing I did when I reached the beach was drink down a bottle of water.

Water quenches your thirst. It can also fill your lungs and drown you. It sustains growing crops. It floods the town. It baptizes the believer. It carries their corpse away without ceremony. You need water to live, and water can kill you. Both things are true. This is a dialectic: seemingly opposing positions that are both correct.

That morning was funny because the danger was real and not real at the same time. I was not in much danger of drowning. I was also not wrong to be afraid. My body understood one truth. The sand beneath my feet revealed another.

Human beings are not natural dialectical thinkers. Americans, with our rigid myths of rugged individualism and black-and-white morality, are especially bad at it. We are trained to dig in our heels. Pick a side. Defend it. Never concede. Concession feels like weakness. Like betrayal. Reality gets flattened into positions.

Reality, at least in the context of this essay, is the deeply interconnected physical experience we move through with our bodies and senses. Reality is tension. Alcohol is bonding and celebration on Wednesday night and misery at work Thursday morning. Fire warms and destroys. Love saves and traps. Tradition preserves and imprisons. Progress liberates and destabilizes. Technology connects and isolates. The truth is not always in the middle.

We often imagine truth requires simplification, as if taking a side means pretending the other side contains nothing at all. American culture encourages this habit. It hands people a ready-made language for what they are supposed to value, fear, desire, condemn, consume, and defend. Dialectical thinking resists that flattening. It is the ability to hold more than one truth at full strength.

That does not mean turning moral judgment into mush. Dialectical thinking asks for something harder: the ability to face tension without immediately resolving it into a slogan. There is strength in acknowledging truth’s different ways of being. Dialectical thinking is strength without amputation. It may be one of the skills we need most, and one of the skills American culture trains out of us most efficiently.

Christianity is partly responsible for this, though not uniquely so. America’s difficulty with contradiction has many parents: capitalism, nationalism, social media, cable news, branding, debate culture, the two-party system, and the ordinary human desire to feel right without being troubled by ambiguity. Still, Christianity helped shape the American moral imagination, and that imagination continues operating even when nobody involved considers themselves religious.

The irony is that Christianity itself is filled with paradox. Christ is human and divine. God is one and three. The kingdom is already here and not yet here. The first shall be last. Lose your life and you will find it. Humans are fallen and beloved. God is justice and mercy. Christianity places contradiction near the center of existence and asks the believer to kneel before it.

Institutions rarely tolerate that kind of living tension for long. Churches, governments, media systems, and ideologies all prefer controlled mystery over open mystery. Real ambiguity gives ordinary people too much room to wander. Too much room to interpret. Too much room to think. So paradox gets fenced in, labeled, managed, supervised.

American culture then secularizes the pattern. The nation becomes a church. The president becomes either savior or antichrist depending on who is speaking. The Constitution becomes holy scripture. The market becomes providence. Entertainment becomes moral mythology. America did not become less religious. It distributed religious instinct across public life. We still have rituals, saints, demons, heresies, purity tests, conversions, excommunications, and sacred texts. They just don’t always live in churches anymore.

Sometimes a dialectic can be acknowledged and you still have to choose a side. I learned that in a Behavioral Health Unit in August of 2025. One night, I was in the common room getting a beverage before bed. There was one other patient hanging around; everyone else had already turned in. He approached me mumbling something, but eventually I realized he wanted to talk basketball.

I politely explained that I did not follow basketball or sports at all. He kept asking basketball questions anyway.

“How do you think the Lakers look against the Celtics this year?”

I don’t know, man, who gives a fuck. “Great,” I told him. “They’re gonna win for sure.”

An orderly appeared and pulled him aside. “Mr. Burroughs, I can’t have you wandering into other patients’ rooms and bothering them after they’ve gone to bed.”

“Well, I had to warn them,” he replied with exhausted sincerity. “This is Injun country!”

This story clarifies an important point. Mr. Burroughs was not pretending. His fear of the whole ward being scalped as they slept was real to him. The orderly’s responsibility was also real. Compassion required acknowledging Burroughs’ experience without surrendering the room to it. So, from a certain perspective, both things were true. Patients should not wander into other people’s rooms bothering them late at night. Meanwhile, for Mr. Burroughs, the ward was apparently crawling with Apaches. The dialectic mattered because it preserved his humanity. It did not decide the practical question. Dude still needed to leave people alone and get his ass in bed.

Politics collapses when people lose the ability to distinguish between partial truth and moral equivalence. One side says, “This policy protects vulnerable people.” The other says, “This policy creates consequences you are refusing to see.” Sometimes both claims contain truth. Not equal truth. Not equal moral weight. Not equal urgency. But some truth.

A serious culture would ask how much truth, what kind, for whom, at what cost, and under what conditions. Dialectical thinking does not mean pretending every position deserves equal respect. Some policies harm people. Some institutions normalize suffering. Some traditions preserve wisdom, while others protect cruelty by calling it order. The work is not to split the difference between harm and care. The work is to admit complexity without using complexity as an excuse.

That is where American politics keeps breaking. If a conservative cannot admit tradition can become cruel, criticism starts to look like an attack on civilization itself. If a liberal cannot admit reform can create unintended consequences, questions start to look like betrayal. If a victim must be perfectly pure to deserve compassion, real victims get discarded. If an accused person must become a monster before due process matters, justice becomes vengeance wearing professional clothes.

Strong belief is not the problem. Brittle belief is the problem: belief that cannot bend around evidence, survive one good point from the other side, or acknowledge its own shadow without feeling disloyal to the tribe.

We live in a culture of recruitment. A recruitment culture does not ask, “What is true?” It asks, “Does this help my side?” It turns every fact into ammunition and every admission into treason. Scroll through social media for ten minutes during any national crisis and you can watch people transforming reality into usable team material in real time. The goal is no longer understanding. The goal is victory.

This is how extremism grows. People become unable to tolerate the truth that complicates their convictions. The contradiction has to go somewhere. If it cannot be held inside the self, it gets projected onto the enemy. THEM.

This happens at the smallest human scale too. If I cannot admit that I envy my friend, I may decide my friend is arrogant. If I cannot admit that someone I love frightens me, I may decide I am merely angry. If I cannot admit that I have failed, I may decide the world has conspired against me. If I cannot admit that I want what I criticize, I may become obsessed with criticizing it. A culture that cannot bend around contradiction eventually breaks.

Now look inside yourself. The self is not one clean thing. A self is body and mind, instinct and performance, longing and restraint. To hold a self together, you have to hold contradiction. If you cannot, you start cutting pieces off yourself. The needy part. The angry part. The soft part. The ambitious part. The guilty part. The strange part. The part that still loves someone who hurt you. The part that knows your side is not innocent. The part that knows your enemy is not entirely wrong.

A person can survive that kind of amputation for a while. A culture can too. Eventually, though, the severed parts come back as symptoms: rage, projection, hypocrisy, addiction, cruelty, fanaticism, despair. The body keeps expressing what the mind refuses to hold.

If your truth requires you to lie about every other truth in the room, it is no longer truth. It is recruitment. Maybe wisdom begins with learning to hold contradictions without flinching, keeping reality intact long enough to respond honestly. Anything powerful enough to help us may also be powerful enough to harm us. Any truth strong enough to matter will cast a shadow when treated as the only truth. Any self worth holding will contain tensions that cannot be resolved without killing something alive.

Don’t demand that reality become simple before you agree to face it. Maybe just stand up and see how deep the water is.

“Mond Crucifixion” by Raphael