Parallel

Parallel is a concept that frames the possibility of total separation. Lines that never meet and maintain consistent distance all the way to infinity. Infinity can only be imagined and that too in a reduced form. So the statement that parallel lines meet at infinity is a kind of statement that establishes nothing and is absurd. For the sake of logical certainty, so that arguments can be taken forward, such speculative statements have made the foundation of disciplines and thereby puncturing entirely any legitimacy that there might have been. Merely to make uncertainty more specifically a parameter that could be dealt with in the scope of logical progression, speculation was introduced. An improbable situation does not imply that it is not possible. Chance is about the randomness of sequential operation. And so disciplinary constructions collapse. These constructions are replaced by suspicions of factual inaccuracy that we project on the world in a rather continuous and shameless way.

We can’t take anybody’s word for it. That is a fact. We frequently do, but where the risk is not very high or where we don’t seem to be immediately co-opted into a system by doing so. So we accept the traffic rules at face value, we follow the laws of the land sometimes, we sometimes let people talk. But we do not go overboard with this allowance. We do not believe that accepting the cultural infrastructure at the cost of the articulation of our own voice is a just situation. Justice is the ultimate goal in all situations and is rarely achieved. Instead of justice, victory at the cost of somebody else’s loss is a more palatable idea for us. But why are we interested in a fragile, fractured and temporary victory over the possibility of stability in social relations that only justice can serve? Because we are confounded by own mortality. We are not interested in anything that lasts longer than our youth. Law is only a way for us to accept notional constraints as absolute so that we can respect them. Culture is a mind game.

But that things are not as they appear is a simple thought. What then? Should everything be rejected? In the favour of what? We can pursue parallels shamelessly knowing fully well that they will not ever meet. We never act on the principle of protecting our interests. We never follow precautions because of limitations of the world we live in. We cannot put off the present because the future does not bear anything. Parallel lines are only forecasts, based on our desperate and restless need to progress and get ahead of ourselves. As far as we know, the shadow that parallel lines cast into the present moment are two lines that need to be dealt in simultaneity. That make the parallelism philosophy a temporal construct, and not just a forecast about a distinctness that will be carried out into the future.

Following this philosophy is to be in the here and now and not float away into the future indefinite. So, we propagate parallels.