In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.

Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.

Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.

Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.

The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.

Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own

Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.

Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.