NEVER SIMPLY BLACK AND WHITE

It is always tempting to see things in black and white or, shall we say, bright and dark, but, unfortunately, things are rarely that simple. For a start, there are two axes, one dominated by free soma in female fashion and the other led by free psyche in male fashion, and therefore there are fundamentally two kinds of bright and dark, or light and shade, even without class complications. Take metachemistry over antimetaphysics at the northwest point of the intercardinal axial compass. Free soma, the female ideal, is a brightness, whilst its bound psychic counterpart is somewhat of a dark shadow, trailing behind the leading string, as it were. Therefore a somatic brightness has to be contrasted, in each gender case, antimetaphysical as well as metachemical, with a psychic darkness. The same is true of chemistry over antiphysics at the southwest point of the intercardinal axial compass, free soma being bright and bound psyche dark. But on the sensible side of the moral divide things are quite otherwise. There free psyche is bright and bound soma dark, whether in terms of physics over antichemistry at the southeast point of the intercardinal axial compass or, up above, of metaphysics over antimetachemistry at its northeast point. The bright side of a male hegemonic coupling, being free, is certainly psychic, whilst its dark side, corresponding to the bound, is somatic. This has some interesting, if quite unconventional, moral ramifications, but I don't wish to enlarge upon that now. Suffice it to say that things are never simply black and white, least of all in terms of evil being somehow dark and good bright (the reverse is actually the case, bearing in mind the distinction between free metachemical soma and bound antichemical soma on primary state-hegemonic terms). To be sure, a distinction between the dark and the bright most certainly exists, and at all points of the intercardinal axial compass, but it is not simply in terms of soma being dark and psyche bright, or vice versa. That is why, with both the female ideal of free soma and the male ideal of free psyche corresponding to the bright side of things, one has a moral incompatibility between them which is no mere black/white dichotomy but a competition between alternative kinds of brightness that is likely to lead, in axial differentiation, to different types of society, depending on which kind of freedom is officially encouraged and regarded as alone right, and to keep those who believe in the one kind quite separate from those who believe in the other, both within and without their particular society. For mutually incompatible, as free females and free males, they respectively remain.