"Dialectics in many different forms has a surprisingly good press. Most people believe that struggle is very important and that it is important to be on the right side in a conflict.... Part of the difficulty is that the human race has an enormous and by no means unreasonable passion for the dramatic, and conflict is much more dramatic than production....The awful truth about the universe - that it is not only rather a muddle, but also pretty dull - is wholly unacceptable to the human imagination. Nevertheless, it is the dull, nondialectical processes that hold the world together, that move it forward, and that provide the setting within which the dialectical processes take place. Evolution is the theatre, dialectics the play. It is a tragic error to mistake the play for the theatre, however, because that all too easily ends in the theatre burning down... Unless there is a reasonably widespread appreciation of the proper role of dialectical processes, these tend to get out of hand and become extremely destructive.... doing more harm than good."
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MysticsPhilosophers from the United StatesQuakersEconomists from the United StatesPeople from Liverpool
Original Language: English
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p. 266 as cited in: "Ecodynamics and societal evolution" at Kairos @ Laetus-in-Praesens.org. Accessed Feb 25, 2012
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Boulding
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Kenneth Boulding
Kenneth Ewart Boulding (18 January 1910 – 18 March 1993) was an economist, educator, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to .
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