Extremes, Nuance & The Golden Mean

It is the natural instinct of a person to seek the extreme opposite to the one that hurt them, not realising they’re trading one set of harms for another by giving up the obvious for the insidious. They trade vices of excess for vices of insufficiency and vice versa, when the remedy and thus desirable end point is in the middle.

Take for example a person born to strict religious parents, such a person often rebels by becoming an ardent anti-theist, before arriving at a point where they realise religion isn’t entirely bad, and is in fact beneficial in many ways – they don’t replicate the zeal and strictness of their parents, but they no longer ridicule it and reject it as completely worthless because they are no longer blinded by the trauma of their upbringing in regards to it. They begun by inhabiting a vice of excess as imposed by their parents (religious teachings taken to a puritanical and tyrannical extent), compensated with a vice of deficiency (rejected all religion as completely useless and ridiculous) and ended up at the golden mean: realising religion can be beneficial and is often wiser than we are in areas which we are inexperienced, whilst also realising the importance of thinking for one’s self.

Another common example is when a young, wholesome naive person falls in love, only to lose that love and become heartbroken. Often they overcompensate by believing the opposite sex is evil, and in doing so become wicked themselves – believing they have free license to mistreat members of the opposite sex because they blame the whole sex for what one member of that sex put them through, only to later realise they are not evil, but far more flawed and imperfect than their previous innocence conceived. So the vice of insufficiency in innocence was to not accurately assess whilst not possessing the means to protect yourself, and the vice of excess was to write off and mistreat an entire sex because one member of that sex hurt you – the golden mean is understanding the opposite sex better so you can manage them better, and be more mindful in your dealings with them.

As such, everything should be in moderation, including moderation, because excess like deprivation in spurts can yield gain. Fasting is good, but starvation is not. Working an 18 hour day can lead to a lot of progress, but trying to sustain that long-term will wreck 99.9% of humans.

Everything is always trying to balance itself, either by pitting one extreme against the other to create balance through cancellation, or through a concurrent blend of duality intertwining complementarily despite their contradictory natures. Stability itself lies in concurrent duality, within stable paradox. So if you have to employ excess in any particular scenario to achieve something, you will have to balance it later with deprivation.

A simple, mundane and widely relatable example of this I can give is drinking alcohol.

If you use alcohol (or any drug for that matter) as a performance enhancer within a given context to overclock your capabilities, you will have a comedown of sorts later on (the hangover) – and so the price of increased ability at one point is decreased ability at another.

We see the inverse of this with fasting. If you fast for cognitive benefits, you’ll be much more energetic and quick minded while fasted, but become sluggish when you eat a big meal to break your fast. The price of increased ability through deprivation was decreased ability through excess. Everything must be offset to balance out – this is why there are no free lunches in life, and everything has a price. Not knowing the price and being unable to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there – it just means the costs are hidden and you don’t know what you’re really getting yourself into.

Going back to the psychological and away from the homeostatic biological, a person who took a lot of risks in life that didn’t pay off will more often than not become risk averse rather than risk calculative.

They go from excess to insufficiency rather than efficiency. They overcompensate, and in doing so trade one inefficiency and mode of failure for another, incorrectly believing the more novel mode of inefficiency to be superior.

The solution to any problem is only a counter extreme, when you seek temporary relief from a prevailing one. Such a solution isn’t sustainable practice, but will at least break the pattern. For example, most incels would get laid if they did a steroid cycle and went on a cocaine bender (eg: Zyzz) – but of course doing endless steroid and cocaine gets you an early death (Zyzz died in a hot tub in Thailand in his early 20’s for living precisely that lifestyle) – what goes up, must come down.

The point however is this: memories retained from novel experiences enjoyed in periods of unsustainable biohacking will allow for a form of personal growth that being stuck in the same mediocre patterns of behaviour for a long time wouldn’t. Think of it like hormesis, a small dose of poison which confers benefit. Some men just need to know what victory tastes like to provide them with a personal frame of reference for wanting to strive and sustainably achieve their goals. Never having known what victory tastes like, and always having lived your life as a loser that never got to enjoy some of life’s finer moments is a miserable metaphysical prison. Knowing what it’s like to be a winner, even if only temporarily, can give the spiritual impetus necessary to more sustainably work towards greatness that was once tasted.

Excess has a time and function, but efficiency and sustainability through optimisation lies in moderation due to the goldilocks principle. So to conclude, realise combatting one extreme with another is often foolish and to be avoided, but in instances where it is useful and justifiable you should realise the new extreme is not a destination, but a transitionary phase along your personal journey to something much more stable, nuanced and wiser.