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Heroic and Ironic

Throughout history, there has been a dialectical relationship between the playful, embroidering, subjective, ironic side of the human spirit and the heroic, serious, goal-oriented, realist, earnest side. The ironic mentality embraces limits and delights in playing within bounds. It understands all limits to be arbitrary, relative, intentional. The heroic mentality rejects limits as obstructions to absolute truth and personal freedom, while worshipping limitlessness as transcendent reality. The heroic is aspiring, straightforward, straight-laced, straight-lined, passionately simplistic, square, naive, concerned with content over form, and tending toward fascism and militarism in its drive toward monumental ideals and monolithic conceptions. The ironic is witty, sarcastic, curvaceous, ornate, sophisticated, skeptical, self-indulgent and self-referential, tending toward decadent aimlessness and empty formalism. Each is dangerous as an extreme. Together, they are the creative engine of history.

RELATED TAGS: [dialectics, dialectical relationship, ironic and heroic, ironic/heroic mentality, rejection of (all) limits, heroic fascism/monumentality, ironic liberalism, monumental ideal(ism), monolithic conception, empty/vapid formalism, engine of history]


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