7 contradictions

Tyler Berbert

19 Feb 2026 — 5 min read

Sky and Water I, M. C. Escher

I

Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

— Miles Davis

II

Words don't matter; words are the missing piece. The world pretty much has a consensus on the big stuff — "hurting kids bad," "public utilities good" — so instead of talking through the details, we need to make society reflect that consensus. We need to remove tangible barriers to doing so, propped up by a sociopathic few. For that action to be effective, it needs to be coordinated and sustained; words enable that. Without that sort of action we get stuck and atomized, kept on the back foot, scrambling to keep individual bodies more or less okay. And this is how we fail; this is how nature was bulldozed – it was wordless, less organized than the assault against it. The people in the bulldozers used words.

Now the bulldozers change course, turning toward us and our minds. You and I produce data; data is the new oil. The whims of capital shred and disintegrate our biorhythms as if with radioactivity, but words build bridges over these interruptions, this mute panic. Words coordinate and sustain action; words reveal that the bulldozers are partly driven by us and our wants; words are required, if not sufficient, for our protection. Words don't matter; words are the missing piece.

III

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

IV

Zohran Mamdani and his team have been successful with sane policies; these are not as connected as they may seem. The world is getting crazier, but sanity, on its own, lacks a certain stickiness, a virality. Alone it will not spread, rally people, fix what’s causing our problems.

One notices another common thread in his messaging: a tenacious enthusiasm, unflappable good cheer. From one angle, this is an insane way to be, given the times we live in; from another, it's precisely what we need. Seal, I'm afraid, was right: no, we're never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy. Crazy in specific ways, sure; in targeted directions, like a fox, some ways being much more productive than others; but we need to be crazier.

V

Power that relies on violence does not represent power of the highest order. The mere fact that another will manages to form and turn against the power-holder attests to the latter's weakness. Wherever power does not come into view at all, it exists without question. The greater power is, the more quietly it works. It just happens; it has no need to draw attention to itself.

To be sure, power can express itself as violence or repression. But it is not based on force. Power need not exclude, prohibit, or censor. Nor does it stand opposed to freedom. Indeed, power can even use freedom to its own ends. Only in its negative form does power manifest itself as a violence that says "no" by shattering the will and annulling freedom. Today, power is assuming increasingly permissive forms.

– Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics

VI

Capital is not blind to what’s hidden. Where there’s upside to be had, even counterintuitively, capital will find and exploit it. Take the power of "incubation" or meditation – not thinking about something – and how it causes new and better thoughts to arise. Or how surveyors used to take copious notes on lands that don't produce oil, but were suspected to contain it, and with new machines we get a lot of oil out of some of those lands. Then there's the notion of "collect now, decrypt later," awaiting the day when quantum computing makes decryption trivial. Even regenerative agriculture is taking hold at larger farming operations, given our growing understanding (though some have known it for millennia) of what makes soil productive.

What capital will continue to not understand – what it is diametrically opposed to understanding – is that some depths are fruitful because we don't plumb them and should stay that way. Lowery Pressly's The Right to Oblivion makes an airtight case for this as it pertains to privacy. Most of us have a stodgy traditional view of what makes privacy valuable. "As humans, we produce data; we should have control over what happens to that data." But the creation of that data is not a given; it’s a choice with considerable and avoidable downsides if neglected. Transforming things about ourselves that were initially vague, protean, and full of potential into things that are definite, recordable, and speakable – that is a choice, and doing it willy-nilly for the sake of "transparency" or "progress" makes us far worse off.

This is because trust is a public good, and trust exists when we have "leeway" as people – when there is space for a person to act in multiple ways. Only then can we trust that they will act in a certain way – a way they said they would, a way springing from mutual interests. But when everything's recorded, when our selves are turned to stone, this ends. A person is no longer capable of growth and change, worthy of trust. Everyone else is the author of their story, not they themselves. We turn into automata, commodities, static bits to be consumed; capacity for trust disappears. As before: there are depths whose contents we treasure, but which only exist because we make them exist, specifically by leaving them be.