Someone attached a wrecking ball to the Swinging Pendulum.

The “swinging pendulum” has always been with us and reflects the shift between opposing positions, such as government involvement vs. market freedom, security vs. civil liberties, or conservative vs. liberal ideals. Arthur Schopenhauer observed: “Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

This strikes me as uncharacteristically optimistic for someone known as the “Philosopher of Pessimism.” Unless his point of rest is the glass half empty. Philosophical pessimism says life isn’t worth living, it’s better to not be born at all, don’t bother to stay alive. It’s also defined by the claim that suffering outweighs pleasure, happiness is rickety at best or outright unreachable, and life has no meaning. Some of the paths offered are antinatalism, voluntary extinction, suicide, and abortion. Not exactly a fun group! Unfortunately, it seems to be the dominant culture these days.

Of course, they don’t see themselves that way. Semantics trumps reality. Abortion is health care. Medically assisted suicide is compassion. It’s better to not bring children into a world such as this. That’s where the pendulum currently rests. Hello wrecking ball.

There was a time when the concept of the “Happy Medium” was the pendulum’s preferred destination. Not forever—nothing is forever—but its journey arc might gather bits and pieces of different viewpoints along the way and make for some incremental progress toward common ground. Now, the happy medium seems to be relegated to the trash heap of history, or at least the trash heap of dated expressions, like Egad. Or zounds. Or worse. Happy medium implies a lack of commitment, whereas extremism is exalted.

We now have things like extreme make-overs—cosmetic surgeries to drastically alter one’s appearance (make me look like Barbie). We have extreme sports like BASE jumping, cliff diving, wingsuit flying, climbing skyscrapers. We have lifestyle choices that adopt extreme diets or fitness regimens, such as “starvemaxxing,” which severely restricts calorie intake to achieve a concept of beauty apparently based on famine chic. We have subcultures like antifa and skinheads that embrace radical approaches. What is the sex-change operation mania but extreme drag? Extreme is good! Extreme shows commitment! Or maybe it’s just what people need in order to feel something, anything, because they’ve become so benumbed by the antinatalism, voluntary extinction, suicide, and abortion ethos.

What if the pendulum gets stuck in this position because the euthanasia, abortion, and sex-change industries, some even sponsored by local governments, like it where it is? Egad.

Let us take heart. Everything around us, even small, quiet things, are ever in flux. Like: Different pendulum clocks mounted on the same wall spontaneously synchronize. No matter when the pendulums begin swinging, within about a half-hour, they are swinging in exactly the opposite direction from each other.

Light bulbs unscrew themselves. Heat expands, cold contracts and moves the screw ridges while earth’s gravity pulls the bulb downward—gradually unscrewing the bulb.

Heartbeats in a petri dish sync up. A cardiac organoid is a cellular model that simulates the structure and function of the heart by replicating features of cardiac tissue including contractions, or heart beats—they are used for research for disease and drug testing. Cardiac organoids can be made from morally benign adult stem cells, like those derived from umbilical cord blood. These are non-tumorigenic – they don’t form tumors in living beings like fetal stem cells do. But—fetal stem cells, some obtained from fetal tissue shortly after abortion, or embryos, show a transduction (transfer of genetic material from one microorganism to another) efficacy of 81.3 percent, while adult stem cells have about 78.1 percent. So, there’s a 4.1 percent higher effectiveness for fetal cells. And that 4.1 percent  makes them preferable to morally benign adult stem cells. Really. Does that 4.1 percent truly represent the difference between success and failure? Or does it represent the semantical, and moral, difference between: Should we do this, and—hey, why the hell not?

Somewhere in the world pendulum clocks spontaneously begin to swing in sync while the earth’s gravity quietly unscrews our lightbulbs. And somewhere in a research laboratory there’s a petri dish holding mini-hearts smaller than a pinhead that use electrical signals to communicate with each other—and synchronize their heart beats.

Listen.