The Daily Planet #118: On Contradiction

The term "contradiction" has many meanings. In logic it means claiming a proposition and its negation are both true at once. In conversation it means asserting the opposite of what someone else is saying. There's the Marxist version where contradictions reveal the underlying instability of the capitalist system.

The most general way of looking at contradictions is to seem them as self-undermining processes, i.e, processes that create the conditions for their own demise.

From a planetary perspective, the biggest contradiction is between the Globe and the Earth. The Globe is the human dominated world, where everything else - every bird, every flower, every rock - is there for us to use as we desire. The Earth doesn't think of humans as special; it's been around for much longer and will continue to do so after we are gone.

The Globe-Earth contradiction arises from the fact that the Globe creates the conditions for its own demise, because the more we extract from the Earth, the more likely it is that we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

The first two months of 2026 have already been quite tumultuous; we can see the traces of systemic contradictions everywhere. I am going to double down on that diagnosis by covering the Globe/Earth contradiction in great detail over the coming year - from breaking news to excerpts from readings to unhinged rants.

Let me leave you with this quote from Marcia Bjornerud's book on Timefulness:

Most humans, including those in affluent and technically advanced countries, have no sense of temporal proportion— the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of environmental instability, the intrinsic timescales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.

I want to cure myself of that alienation over the next ten months.