In the event of a breakdown, transparency is a weapon. Apologists who endure the crisis will certainly refrain from listening through democracy, identity, and shared meaning. It is darkest before dawn and they argue as if the end of liberal democracy redeems the absolute, blurred by pluralism.
But maybe it’s the darkest in Dawn – when you want to explain, define, and control the path for insight. Opacity offers another kind of clarity that doesn’t just look at what it wants.
We’re obsessed with adding things up. I demand clarity and hope for explanation. Life, culture and stories are shoved into neat boxes. It’s not just that unfamiliar people don’t notice. It is labeled, translated and broken down. This is only accepted on our terms.
Let’s take a simple example. “Where do you come from?” From “Chicago” to the real questions, “No, I mean, I’m Asian, what kind of thing?” as if the identity was a multi-choice test.
Or, a friend explains her spiritual habits and someone cuts, “Oh, like Buddhism.” Put it in the box before you hear it. Or, the news anchor pushes the protesters and “clear the goals” as if decades of fraud could be summed up in the mission statement.
There is the same pressure at every moment. Make the familiar and familiar safe, everything looks like understanding. Anything that doesn’t fit will be fixed and then praised as “real.”
This impulse is arrogant. Until we analyze it, believe nothing is real. Expecting openness is an excuse to treat everything and everyone as a problem to solve. By fighting each other, we grow in the same way. We express complaints, urgency, and identity on the same terms.
It is trust to leave room for the unknowns of others. Who they are is not limited by our perception. We will not be completely clear, but the better: to make freedom not take over.
Not all that resists is hidden. Sometimes it’s just another way of being. Silence is soft, held, and honest. It can also be bold: there is nothing to say reliable as to know when it will be quiet.
Even silence has a spine.
Theologians talk about “negative theology.” Understanding God as absent, unknown, unclassified. It reflects Tao’s inefficiency – “The Tao that can be spoken is not an eternal Tao” – and Moses approaches “the thick darkness in which God was.
As the poet Rosuke said, “In the dark times, the eyes begin to see,” the truth speaks away from his face.
Cultural critic Eduard Glissanto links this to “opacity.” This is a right not to be understood. Not as a avoidance, but as a form of respect. He rejects the idea that transparency guarantees truth.
Taking advantage of Caribbean heritage, Glissanto encouraged them to “think like an archipelago.” Opacity resists reducing others in our reflection. It ignores the Western impulses to universalize for a more inclusive world and opens up space.
Gk Chesterton once wrote: “Of course, I always felt vaguely that there were other people there, but only in a moment of clear psychological experience, the thing that really made me realize is that you suddenly realize that the house next door, which he always thought was empty, actually lives there.”
Others exist – not as an extension of us, but as perfect, irreducible beings.
Mystery doesn’t separate us. That’s what makes connection possible.
Differences talk for yourself. Generosity shows us not only what we accept, but how we stay.
Sometimes we can get a political glimpse of this. At citizen gatherings, strangers with opposite views can really and really hear – no slogans or anything grand, but a slow, curious task.
Why do you prefer enemies over conversation? Rather than tame differences, what do they hear? actually teeth.
Others have more than we know. And there’s more than we acknowledge. Mysteries create space for truth beyond what we choose to believe.
Genuine clarity is only possible if the “known” is allowed to remain open. It’s an attitude that is almost respectful.
Darkness may be the dawn of fresh insights.
Notes and reading
“… emulates the victims that each claims to defend.” – “The Power of Right-wing Victims,” Jeff Schlenberger (Sackak – May 23, 2025). Shullenberger manages the editor compact. Here he pretends to be “anti-mimic” to justify their own rivals, tracking how the new rights adopted Thiel, Vance and the company as enthusiasts of imitation theory.
édouard glissant (1928–2011) accepted universal reasons, but asked how the reasons work and what they can do Really It’s said by that name. He introduced “Archipelago thinking” – a concept that is currently attracting wider attention – connecting globals Creation Identity is essentially plural. The difference is that in brilliance, coexist without reducing identity. Poetics of Relationship (1997).
> Michael Weedon, Think of it like an archipelago: the Paradox of Eduard Glissanto (2018). Glissanto imagines Inclusive singularity-Unconventional, not appropriate, intermittently intermittently throughout the conversation. This vision resists both the normative universality that flattens the difference and the populist naturalism that exploits it.
Strange people to ourselves – Julia Kristeva (1991): “We are our own foreigners and we can live with others with the help of that only support.” Bulgarian-born French philosopher and psychoanalyst Cristeva explored language, subjectivity and the unconscious, and saw postmodernism come and go.
“Tao that you can talk about is not an eternal tao,” Taotechin said.Chapter 1. “Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” – Exodus 20:21.
Theodore Roske – From “dark times” Collected poems by Theodore Rosuke (1963).
Goalkeeper Chesterton – Napoleon of Notting Hill (2023), Chapter 1.
“Authentic clarity… an attitude that is close to respect.” – In another context after the philosophical theologian Katherine Pickstock. After writing (1998), 20. A hard, radical read that interprets sacramentally “being” – removes it from the scope of traditional postmodernism and recovery True existence.
other
“Negative Ability” – “It means what quality has happened to form a person of merit that Shakespeare had so much possession, especially in literature, a negative ability that one could not rely on and reach after uncertainty, mystery, doubt, facts and reasons.” – John Keats, John Keats’ Complete Sonnet – All 64 Poems – Chapter VIII (Kindle Edition, 2017).
Transparent society and Burnout SocietyY (2015) – Byung – Chul Han, a cultural theorist who currently teaches in Berlin. “Transparency is an ideology…Forcing us to flatten — creates our functional elements within the system. “The German Kingdom Han blends Eastern and Western philosophical traditions.
Tip #204 – Contradiction and clarity
The fate of the union depends on balance
Approx. 2 + 2 = 5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
