Eden said:
I feel a more positive change can come about through the development of an "ideal" that doesn't polarize the opposition.
To effect change, the "juices must be flowing". And for that, a current is needed. The current is established when there is a positive and a negative pole, establishing a voltage that makes the current flow. The greater the voltage, the greater the current. To move a huge energetic block in the body of Gaia (or in the collective unconscious), a proportionally huge voltage is required. But human history has taught us that high voltage is BAD, because it nearly always results in war and destruction. So we voluntarily constrained it - as a culture - and in its place, we tried to establish these "ideals that don't polarize the opposition".
From time to time, people came who said that this is BAD, because "being soft" is a cop-out, an artificial mind-trick that has no basis in reality, which robs us from our aliveness, our humanness - if we cannot let out our anger in a natural way, then we will become sick, both as persons and as a culture. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent figures who came up with this idea. And after Nietzsche came Adolf Hitler who finally cemented the conviction in the Western mind that we MUST NOT LET THE CURRENT FLOW AT ALL because this is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS. The result of which is a psychologically highly controlled society, where even the length of a banana is officially controlled by governmental standards.
We need a solution that can release the power inherent in the Good/Bad dialectic with 100% involvement, with an inner control which guarantees that the process doesn't get out of hand. Without such control, we get Hitler. If there is such a control, we get an enlightened sage. What is the difference? What is the nature of this control - if it is a "control" at all (as we usually understand the word)? If we can find this out - as a culture - then I believe we will have stepped onto the next level of our evolution.
(Another analogy of this process is our handling of atomic power. Atomic bomb vs. nuclear reactor. Or maybe even psychedelic drugs: weapons of mass delusion vs. chemical agents of enlightenment. The factor that makes these apart is a still unknown potential hiding in the human mind, the holy grail of the current evolutionary cycle.)
The difficulty inherent in this discussion comes from the fact that we are tackling one of the deepest riddles of humanity.