Maximizing Benefit On All Sides

The process of achieving optimal solutions in presence of two sides clashing does not come from compromise but rather from supporting what each side is right about while eliminating what it is wrong about. In most cases, the motive for each side is legitimate, and it is right to affirm itself and what is behind it; but it becomes wrong when it starts to deny its opposite or seek to drive its opposite into extinction.

People who are in support of technology and prosperity are right to pursue technological and economic progress, wrong to deny the richness, value and beauty of nature. People who are in support of nature are right to seek to preserve nature in its richness and beauty, wrong to attack technological and economic progress.

People involved in science, or having a scientific worldview, are right to be pursuing knowledge and fact, wrong to pathologize or deny spiritual experience. Spiritual and religious entities are right to give people the right to spiritual experience, wrong to deny scientific fact or to see science as an evil.

The pro-business people are right to support business growth and innovation, wrong to deny the usefulness and contribution of non-business entities. The pro-government people are right to affirm the importance of government science, education, and projects such as the Interstate and the Internet, wrong when they see business itself as a problem or over-regulate economic activity.

The people who value beauty are right to affirm, celebrate and respect beauty in all its forms including in people; wrong when they claim that only beauty is important or that someone who's not attractive can't have a good life. The other side is right to state that a person not seen as beautiful in her hometown does not have to be relegated to a lonely or degrading existence; wrong to attack beauty or to abuse beautiful women and men who love them.

Feminists are right to seek equal treatment and equal power for women based on their intelligence and willingness to work hard, wrong to devalue women's physicality or to attack women for loving men and having children. The "traditionalists" are right to affirm the child-bearing and mothering role, wrong to tell women that that is the only thing that they can be.

In all cases, what we see is a legitimate motive seeking to make a place for itself. This is the case whether the motive is technology or nature; science or spirituality; business or government; beauty or egalitarianism; women's minds or women's bodies. All of these motives have a right to such a place; but the right that it does not have is to prevent other legitimate motives from coming into existence. To look for the core of the motive and give it
constructive expression, while ensuring that it has respect for things other than itself, is to take what each side is right about and bring it into fruition while preventing each side from undermining the other. And that results in optimal situation that maximizes the core of each side while protecting both from negative interference, affectuating optimization and benefit all across the board.