FOR the capitalist class, dividing political opinion into various parties and factions helps to sustain an important illusion. One might logically argue that people naturally have different opinions, and this is true, but the wider purpose this serves is to prevent those who are more wily and astute from creating ideological blends that genuinely combine or transcend the programmes offered by both Right and Left.

Consider, for example, how the characters in a play are so very dissimilar. If they merely thought, spoke or dressed in the same manner the playwright would be a laughing-stock. A performance only works because the characters are allowed to clash with one another. The same is true of politicians. They are permitted to engage in a carefully orchestrated charade simply because each participant is working for the same theatre company.

In Tractate 2 of his third Ennead, the Greek thinker Plotinus (204-270) argues that what he describes as the reason-principle is “at war with itself” and “has the unity, or harmony, created by the characters in a play”. In other words, the philosopher is telling us that without friction there is no cohesiveness. Again, we may relate this to the artificial opposition that one finds in the parliamentary system and one which inevitably works in the favour of our enemies. I would even suggest that what we observe in liberal-democracy represents a type of harmony for disharmonious ends. Unity at the centre, if you will, that inevitably leads to chaos and disunity for the rest of us.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) formulated his own views about dialectical idealism from the Ancient Greeks, insisting that only from a clash of ideas we can arrive at some kind of synthesis or consensus. There is also a philosophical school of thought known as dialetheism, which argues that contradictions are a myth and that a statement can be both true and false at the same time. Its critics, on the other hand, dismiss this idea on account of dialetheists accepting the existence of affirmation and negation and yet failing to capture a crucial feature of the latter, which it describes as ‘absoluteness of disagreement’.

What this means, of course, is that whilst it is possible for one person to believe that the moon is made of cheese and another to deny it, a dialetheist might come along and say that both statements are true and that the moon is both made of cheese and not made of cheese. The dialethist would even go on to deny the truth or falsehood of what he or she had just said. A Zen Buddhist might refer to this phenomenon as ‘non-dualism’. However, this means that it impossible for the original statement to be denied. It effectively removes the oppositional factor from the equation altogether.

Returning to what I said earlier about parties and factions, if a politician became a dialetheist then he or she might have a very short career. The only way to break the stranglehold of liberal-democracy, therefore, is to reverse what I described above as harmony towards disharmonious ends and, ourselves, use disharmonious means for harmonious ends. Create disharmony and confusion at the centre, whilst maintaining harmony and order on the periphery.