“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.“
“If a radical political alternative is not opened up....then we are essentially going to amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction.”
Seeing the transformative potential in a ‘radical political alternative’ is definitely ‘believing in something’ — it’s staking a claim on the vast landscape of ideas and precluding yourself from believing in its opposite (that everything is just fine in the socio-political realm). Terence was also vocal about opposing pernicious forms of bullshit. The two above quotes contradict each other and it’s interesting that he recognized the inevitability of contradiction. We all do this and it’s humbling to catch it. In the end, it can strengthen our ideas. From what I can see, Terence sought sweeping transformation of the world away from the hierarchical, ego-centric, ecocidal status quo, but he believed we shouldn’t be so dogmatic in our paths that we refuse to grow or listen to others. Indeed, the status quo already is ‘a belief in something’ writ large — hierarchy, ego-centrism, ecocide. If we want a world where ‘the good life’ is cultivated, where we can play with ideas rather than ideologies dominating us, we need to think bigger and move beyond this status quo. Only then can contradiction coexist (as opposed to causing war, structural violence, etc.).