The good is not the absence of the bad
Jul 7, 2023
I remember when this one “jumped out at me”. In Colorado in 2013 I was sitting around playing music with Elise and she said something like “I want this one to be like raw/stripped down” and I immediately saw what she didn’t understand about “how that works”
In that specific case, the thing I could tell from how she intoned what she said was that she was thinking that “raw/stripped-down-ness” is something that you achieve by “getting rid of something”
Uhhhh ok I can see how you might have come to that conclusion but no that’s not actually how you get the thing you want there
“Raw/stripped-down-ness” is a “thing that you have to achieve” (eg by being able to play with solid time). It has “vibe”, it has “feel”. And those aren’t like defined/achieved in terms of the absence of something that you think is not that
So the more general statement of the fallacy (or really I guess the truth, the negation of the fallacy) is “the good is not the absence of the bad”
(I then think that the underlying fallacy is thinking that you’re in a narrower/smaller space than you actually are)
So as with all fallacies it’s good to notice when someone might be basing what they’re thinking on it
Certainly this can apply to how people think about health and illness
But thinking of health as the absence of illness would logically violate this idea
So that’s kind of deep right, if you’re in a state of illness you shouldn’t be trying to “get rid of it”
So how does that work?
Well that’s a good one to ponder