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Paolo Soleri's Glossary of Terms |
Opportunism
Opportunism presupposes stresses which
go beyond the physical laws. There is no opportunism in the
coming together of oxygen and hydrogen to generate water.
The fact of waterness is intrinsic to the nature of reality. The biological stresses are anchored to survival,
a novelty in the "physical" reality.
In the simplest manifestation of life
there is not a consciousness guiding and staying the course
which is most opportune. Selection and adaptation in their
most impassive self are the arbiter for life and death.
Throughout the food chain, 3-4 eons
on this planet, the opportunity to survive and procreate,
is all there was that living reality could offer. Consequently
opportunism is the agency that saturates the doings of life.
Tolerance, consideration, generosity,
abnegation, self-sacrifice, if they began to be felt, were
and are of a protoloving nature and they relate to populations
not to individuals (some mammals have a foot in the door of
consciousness). Opportunism is and remains the most innate
of our drives and it is more and more adopted by individuals
of the Homo Sapien population as a totally legitimate expression
of the ego. Capitalism is the most recent incarnation of opportunism
, and there are its strengths and limitations. The evolution
of man and minds will be the story of post opportunism or
it will be a story of sorrow, sadness, and suffering. |
