Where do you stand politically?

[Grey Acumen]

Actually, it just makes you seem like you're trying to be a pain in the butt, and that you didn't really bother reading everything, or you interpreted everything word for word even if the use of my wording made it obvious that there was an entirely different intent. My linguistic skills are reasonable, but I never bothered remembering specific terminologies.

As I have pointed out, emotional reasoning is just as important as rational thinking, but you still seem to be getting hung up on this idea that if I'm putting rational on one end and emotional on teh other, that emotional must equal irrational.

If anything, my viewpoint extends much further back than just 18th century. Try going all the way back to Taosim for the concept of yin and yang. The western take on this had originally interpreted the two halves as Good and Evil, but really, it represents that the best results come from a balance between the two sides, while the complete lack of one or the other is actually the worst possibility.

For a more modern look at these concepts, you can easily be pointed towards Frued's basic conceptualization of Id, Ego, and Super Ego. Where Yin and Yang and the equivalent of Id and Super Ego, and Ego is our ability to control the balance between the use of these two halves. Where if we operate entirely on Id, we become selfish at the expense of everyone else, if we operate only on Super Ego, we become totally selfless and end up sacrificing ourselves. A healthy mindset is usually found close as possible to balancing these points.

In American politics, you have voters typically broken up into Democratic and Republican. If you look back over the history of elections, you've typically seen a constant swing roughly 10 years or so for each from Democratic to Republican and back again. In this case, you again have a yin yang setup, where general society is attempting to find a balance between the stances of the two parties.

teh first half of the 10 years typically gives a chance for whichever party is in power to balance out the stance of the previously elected party, but the second half is the point at which the political policies can be seen as leaning back away from the balancing point and people see the need to elect someone in the opposing party to bring balance back to the political environment. At which point the process repeats.

The same duality can be found just as easily in these forums. Typically, any debate in VGChartz ends up revolving around only 2 consoles at a time, even though there are 3 to consider. You either have the PS3 vs the Wii, in  which you are comparing graphics and processing power vs controls and simplicity, or 360 vs PS3, where people compare total sales vs selling rate since launch, and game library vs reliability, or you have Wii vs 360 comparing the sales and hardcore vs casual gamers.

These duality concepts exist in practically every possible point over which there can be any type of debate, and any type of debate naturally tends towards two opposing factions, where the correct answer is actually in the middle.

Left vs Right, Selfishness vs Selflessness, Pride vs Humility, type A vs type B personality, man vs woman, young vs old, freedom vs safety, science vs art, so on and so forth.

It is this dichotomy that fuels debate, as if one side was clearly correct, the debate would soon be won by one side or the other, but if both sides came to a consensus on that middle stance, then the debate would again be over. Therefor any lasting debate will almost always stem from a constant state of two extreme views that have a roughly identifiable balance point.