If we could call out a handful of natural laws in this life, contrast would be one of those.
Contrast makes one side exist because of the other. Contrast sets two sides to depend on each other.
Heaven without hell.
Patience without impatience.
Peace without war.
Brave without cowardice.
Rich without poor.
Noise without silence.
Laugh without cry.
Life without death.
Contrast would help us understand the world's history. We went from one stage of the economy to another. Countries' landscapes and perspectives have changed because of contrast. Human narrative is based on contrast. Philosophy plays with it. Cultural identities sit on a spectrum to each other.
Bestselling author Matthew Dicks said that the greatest stories have contrast as a king.
Books and movies use contrast from one side to the other bluntly or through a storyline: How to be a better person. How to fight evil. How to be more spiritual. How the guy rescues the kidnapped princess. How the woman defies social conditions for a place in society. How the man discovers that his kids are the most important thing. How to be grateful. How to lose weight. How to stop doing X and do Y instead.
Problems themselves contrast with the struggle on one side and the solution on the other. Problems cannot exist without solutions, and as author Seth Godin says, situations without solutions are not problems.
Inventions exist because of contrast. The more pressing the problem, the more disruptive the solution. The most disruptive inventions happened because of wars or world conflicts: atomic energy, human rights, microprocessors, the internet, jets, rockets, antibiotics, GPS, microwave ovens, or the COVID-19 vaccine.
Contrast drives the world, economy, climate change, emotions, and place in society.
At a dinner party, contrast can tell who is not the follower and who is the alpha instead. The world praises the outliers by making the averages disappear. You don’t get the job if you’re not different. You might be single because you lack contrast. Fit in, and you disappear. Contrast shows the way not to disappear.
Contrast makes you know yourself. You say you are different because you compare your behaviours to those of the old you. Our personal growth reflects change. Change is contrast, and most of the time, change is positive.
Without contrast, the world would have one colour, one food, and no way of thinking.
As a child, I used to mix music for hundreds of hours. I couldn’t live without the feeling of being lifted with songs I weirdly only liked. Then, I called myself a DJ and prayed to my family to buy me a mixing deck. Bring in addiction. I dived into it and invested hundreds of hours mixing music. I became anti-social, careless and selfish with my time. Fulfilling my dream that, one day, I will be playing music that I love around the world.
The problem was that I sucked. I was really bad at it.
In time, I called myself out of the game, but before doing so, I discovered that songs work in different tonalities and are structured in strings with seven keynotes. Banging my head, trying to understand how music on different strings matched each other, I found that, in every sequence, a handful of notes could match another string. Mixing music never sounded better. That is contrast.
We need to accept contrast because otherwise, life would be a disaster.
Can manipulating contrast be negative? Yes. Forcing two parts that don’t contrast can be dangerous. To my point above, it’s like having two pieces of music in different keys and blending them. That is anti-contrast.
Anti-contrast can act as a counterforce to the uniqueness we can develop as individuals. It can be reflected in our parents, inner circles, or forced environment. Anti-contrast may seek to direct you to a lucrative and comfortable career path. If these counterforces become strong enough, your inclinations and desires will become modelled on those of others.
Anti-contrast makes you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.
As Robert Greene pointed out, the consequences are that “we become complacent, ultra-conservative, dependent, impatient, grandiose and inflexible.” And maybe anti-contrast makes us do so until we explode.
Take Paul Gauguin. He was a successful thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker when he left his wife and five children to become a famous painter.
Anti-contrast makes examples of enlightenment later in life, costing people’s ethical ways or resulting in divorces, serial killers or suicides. Some others can just stay hidden and never depart from their childhood experiences. Pressure can explode in different, uncertain ways.
The evils of anti-contrast.
Anti-contrast makes us blind and stubborn by only speaking and not listening.
Anti-contrast makes me think of the hundreds of times I made a mistake, reacted wrongly to a situation, and never apologised. The same is true for people around me or influential people in the world.
Anti-contrast provokes negative influence, resistance, wars, broken relationships, and unethical points of view, among other things.
Consider science and religion. Author Jonathan Sacks argues that Science needs religion, and religion needs science. “Science takes things apart to see how they work,” he says, “and religion puts things together to see what they mean.” They are part of the same contrast. But to his point, anti-contrast is the extreme version of it, like religious people sliding into the belief that only those who believe are good and everyone else is wrong. On the other hand, scientists can argue that life is meaningless and there’s no purpose in living. That’s arrogance and not humility.
Clashes between contrast and anti-contrast are inevitable; it’s human nature. But the beauty lies in one overlooked word that drives balance across nature: entropy.
Entropy is a fancy way of saying that things fall apart while creating balance. Order and chaos are cyclical. Order provokes disorder and vice versa. Music needs harmony to play coherently, but chaos inside the music is what brings the unexpected and most surprising pieces. The new instruments, the high notes, the long notes, the joy of music.
It is said that nature promotes disorder by creating little pockets of order. Science states that when nature finds points of focused energy, it spreads that energy out.
And then make it match somewhere else again.
Entropy is why we can match with others and see connection points. The closure of stages is a result of entropy. Negotiations and common ground are a result of entropy. So are our best friends, hidden forces, and life calling.
Entropy is why art exists, and, as Anne Lamott says, “art makes it hard to ignore the truth.” Art in poetry, painting, singing, dancing, laughing, or the sublime.
We still study entropy. We still don’t understand it fully. We just try to make sense of it.
Like a snowflake, when you see one closely, you notice the perfect craft of the sun’s energy in multiple faces that reflect light chaotically in all directions. How can we explain the beauty of a snowflake?
They say that the Big Bang, or the origin of life, happened because of entropy. There are books about love, life, origin, God, purpose and discovery that we discover every day in this quest.
Entropy is why we can love other human beings among thousands of others and even marry them. “If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars,” wrote the depressed Antoine de Saint-Exúpery in The Little Prince, “it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars.”
We do life and take action. We learn or continue making the same mistakes. Through it all, entropy regulates the nature between the contrasts and anti-contrasts.
The ultimate form of contrast is life and death. What once was will never be again. The impermanence of life. The acceptance of things that should remain like they never will.
Susan Cain describes a rabbinic story to reflect this point beautifully; it goes like this:
Once, a rabbi was walking a little boy down a path when they came across a dead bird. The boy asks why the bird had to die,
“All living things die,” explained the rabbi.
“Will you die?” asks the boy.
“Yes,” answers the rabbi.
“Will I?”
“Yes.”
The boy looks distressed.
“Why?” he asks urgently.
“Because that’s what makes life precious,” says the rabbi.
Sources
[1] Storyworthy - Matthew Dicks
[2] Same as Ever - Morgan Housel
[3] Mastery - Robert Greene
[4] Clear Thinking - Shane Parrish
[5] The Great Partnership - Jonathan Sacks
[6] Conspiracy - Dan Brown
[7] Bittersweet - Susan Cain