Balance For The Sake Of Balance

Balance is not always necessary or helpful.  No one needs to sometimes kidnap people and sometimes refrain.  No one grows as a person or accomplishes anything but a lapse into stupidity if they yield to emotionalism.  Where balance is something needed or helpful, it is not because balance, real or perceived, makes something true; it is truth that balance hinges on, and it is impossible for it to ever be the other way around.  Prizing balance for the sake of balance entails a disregard for truth that treats truth as if it hinges on balance, when without truth there would be nothing to know about balance in the first place because there would be no facts about it.

Should someone strive to be partly just and partly unjust?  What if they sometimes murdered or raped people and sometimes did not?  That would be a life of balance.  As a moment of rationalistic contemplation reveals, if something truly is unjust, no one should ever practice it and everyone should oppose it, and most people who pay lip service for balance do not really want balance in everything.  Balance is irrelevant to matters of truth, reason, and justice.  Should someone strive to be partly rationalistic and partly emotionalistic, or perhaps partly concerned with philosophical truths and partly concerned with shallow pursuits?  Again, a second of rationalistic reflection is all that is necessary to expose how self-refuting any rejection of reason and motivation for sidestepping truth is.

A life of total balance would not just mean that a person stops at making time for both deep relationships and professional work or enjoying different kinds of foods on different occasions.  These are specific, limited applications of balance that are helpful for a life of flourishing, but even they are not necessary for either subjective happiness or personal alignment with objective reality.  However, what some people seem to mean by balance is a literal mixture of apathy and interest in matters of ultimate truth, a partial commitment to living out their worldviews, and a selective tendency to tolerate irrational and hypocritical people.  Balance in some areas of life is necessary if one wants to achieve a specific goal, but not all goals are rational, important, or even personally healthy.

Being both purely rationalistic and deeply introspective on an emotional and broader psychological level, for example, is a kind of balance, but it is only because of reason that either can be understood and only because of reason that there are truths about reason itself and emotions.  It is still never anything but utterly stupid to be an emotionalist, just as it is never anything more than inherently rational and helpful to cling to reason in all aspects of life.  Some applications of rationalism and some adherence to emotionalism might be balanced in a sense, but only a fool would think this is rational--and they would have to use reason to argue against it in their mind or with someone else.  Balance is objectively not what truth-oriented philosophy is about.

Thus, balance for the sake of balance is not only pointless and futile because it is not about truth, but it is also something that a rational person will either completely avoid on their own, perhaps even without specifically thinking about it, or actively reject upon encountering this idea in social interactions.  A rational person will indeed understand and seek out some kinds of balance if they wish to, say, cultivate two friendships at once or allow themselves to maintain physical fitness while being inactive at other times.  These things require balance.  When it comes to truth and knowledge, balance has no place except as something that happens to be found in perhaps a few random places (like being perfectly rationalistic and deeply introspective on an emotional level).  Reflection with balance as the goal is a sure way to avoid verifiable truths.