THE MANIPULATIVE POWER OF COMPRESSED PARADOX
A liar from Crete said all Cretans are liars and then asked if he lied. If he lied, then he did not. And if he did not lie, then he did. It cannot be true because it would make the speaker a liar and therefore what he says is false. Neither can it be true because that would imply that Cretans are truth-tellers and consequently what the speaker says would be true. It is both true and false. This paradox makes us feel ambivalent and uncertain because we’re taught to keep things separated and to think in terms of cause and effect.
Thinking in terms of contradictions and paradoxes are hallmarks of creative thinking. In medicine, Louis Pasteur discovered the principle of immunology by discovering that some infected chickens survived a cholera bacillus. When they and uninfected chickens were inoculated with a new virulent culture, the uninfected chickens died and the infected chickens survived. The surviving chickens were both “diseased and not-diseased” at the same time. The paradoxical discovery that disease could function to prevent disease has saved millions of lives over the years.
Imagining two opposites or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images existing simultaneously is beyond logic. It is a type of conceptualizing in which the thinking processes transcend ordinary logical thinking. If you hold two opposites together, your mind moves to a new level. The suspension of thought allows intelligence beyond thought to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble free from the mind.
The created conditions are ambivalence and incongruity which are tolerated by creative people. For instance, imagine being successful and a failure simultaneously. The ambivalence changes the way we feel and see and makes possible a different thought process. “Successful and failure” inspires the thought of having to “learning how to fail your way...