The Other Side of Another

It seems that from the moment time began, if it had a beginning, there was always the other side of another. From the Biblical allegory of Cain and Abel, the other side of another played a pivotal role, just as Adam and Eve were created to be each the other side of another. From the moment, whenever that was, humanity begun to ponder these things, it was always the other side of another that made the world that it is today. 

Let's first do some "housekeeping" on the word "another" before we get to why this is worth spending twenty minutes of your reading time. 

It appears that the word "other", to mean different and discreet entity, was a stand alone word in the English language, needless of any modification.  Now to describe it, since it begins with a vowel, one must say, "an other", just as we would say an egg, an idiom, etc.  It is conceivable that it was merely contracted and later fully evolved more easily into one word, "another".  Just as well that it did because the English language just found another way to prove that is the most efficient language in the world, in my opinion.  I say that as a non-native English speaker.  As such, I sought with great interest anything I could learn about my fourth adopted language. (the other three were all Filipino, but each was nevertheless a distinct language, not just a dialect, albeit each had origins going back to perhaps one proto language derived from Malay (just as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, may all have come from one proto origin but they are three different languages now). I may have just overextended all allowable assumptions on my part as I am not a linguistic expert, nor an amateur lexicographer, not even by a long shot.

One last thing about "another" before we move on. It is so versatile that it can merely be the opposite of one, as in "one went one way, another went the other way", or as a reciprocal as in, "to love one another", or possessively as in "another's arms", and though typically singular, it will modify plural words, as in "another five yards", "another ten years", etc. It can even summon a lot of weighty ambiguity, when the boss uses it in, "I need another opinion or idea". It can connote a foreboding urgency when, "we need another set of tests" or "another lab work". Then relegated to a mere footnote, people, at one time, begun inserting the word, "whole" , into another, to say "a whole nother". If it was an attempt at word evolution, it failed to take hold and did not survive, except as a colloquial artifact.

Now that you know all there is to know about another, we can get into what is on the other side of another?

Everywhere we look, as if baked in all of Creation, there is one and there is always the other side of another. Even among identical twins, the phenomenon is inescapably and naturally real.  Botanists, farmers and horticulture hobbyists have cloned plants for centuries, no two are exactly the same because there was and will always be the other side of another.  Diversity - well known for driving the sustainability, survival and improvement of all living things is brought on by one and the inevitable another side of it.

When males of many pack species of animals, i.e. lions, wolves, chimpanzees, etc. are driven out of their territory, it was as much as avoiding interbreeding as it was about allowing them to spread the gene pool, acting as the other side of another to a different pack or pride, farther away. 

Even in social and inter-personal relationships, opposites attract just as often, if not more so, than homogeneous connections. Couples with two different interests seem to have more to learn from each other as opposed to those with similar interests who are prone to argue more vehemently over the same thing, over and over.  That, right there, is my piece of psychobabble but it worked for me and my wife. We come from different backgrounds, with different tastes in music, the arts and a few others, but for fifty one years it worked more as if an alloy was created out of the combination.

The Stone Age as a historical step for humanity was just that - a step.  There was little our ancestors can do but shape them; only when soft mortar and clay were mixed with stone that ended cave dwelling. Fire did a lot but only when copper was mixed with tin that ushered the Bronze Age. The Iron Age would have been a dead end until somebody came up with infusing carbon to it which gave us steel.  From there it was leaps and bounds for our development.

Lightning, electricity, magnetism are forces driven by two opposing phenomenon of positive and negative, plusses and minuses (+,-), and two opposing poles. In magnetism, two similar north poles or south poles, do not want to have anything to do with each other. It is the negatively charged electron orbiting the positively charged proton in a nucleus that creates one hydrogen atom. All other compounds are put together the same way.

Something can be said of a philosophy that goes back to ancient China that is popular to the reader - the idea of the yin and yang. It may not answer all that we can ask of the universal duality that seems to pervade everything around us; but, if I may suggest, it is worth reading about.  There is a cache of material that is a mere click away if one is inclined to look.

On the other hand, the quest or yearning for the Aryan Race was  doomed from the beginning, as it was nothing more than an astoundingly ignorant and misguided idea only fools could have conceived. Animal species knew better, so it was a case of human folly that should never be repeated. For without the other side of another, humanity should already have regressed into extinction eons ago.  

So it is that today, in every sociological, political, educational, religious coalescence of people, uniformity and singularity of ideas and ideology will doom any society into an ideological inbreeding. Silencing one group so that one monolithic society may emerge is the greatest existential threat. Once social rules, ideas, ideologies and belief systems get funneled into one monochromatic existence, the result will be a monolithic society that will not survive for very long. Silencing opposing opinions, censoring other ideas, one party rule in any government might seem to create a "feel good" environment but only for a while.  Monolithic societies are doomed from the moment they are created.

So, let us not forget that we were not born from just one side but from one and the other side of another.