Passion and destruction - a collective exploration

You're gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.

Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:

• "I created a sandcastle"
• "I changed a sandcastle"
• "I destroyed a sandcastle"

I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.

So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.

So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?

I've thought about this, I'm afraid my take won't be too deep, but that's just the cycle.

You pull things apart or away from their natural state and destroy what their original properties were to create something with different properties. There's no other way to make anything, creation is destruction, destruction is creation, and so the cycle will continue.

Even when. Your intent is purely destructive in nature you are creating something new, disordered and chaotic though it might be.

And it's not just humans doing it, it's happening all around you all the time, the universe breathes in this constant cycle of destruction and creation, no moment existing twice.

I think boils down to the limits of the term “destruction.”

If I “destroy” a sandwich, I’m saying something positive.

If I “destroy” someone’s country, I’m saying something negative.

This may seem somewhat trite but really and truly: it’s about how you define “destruction.”

What is "creation?" Is creation the act of bringing forth something that did not before exist, or does creation include creativity? Because if the former, you may be right, which is part of why we should devalue in our society the mysticism of creation and making and instead put some more focus on nurturing, care, and long-term maintenance. If the latter, I disagree. Creativity can be expressed through these acts of maintenance, nurturing, and care, all of which set at odds of destruction

Creation and destruction is all just transformation though I guess. It takes some stuff and makes it into other stuff. Understanding a specific transformation as creation or destruction depends on your point of view. If the input that is lost is noteworthy then we’ll see the destruction. If the newly produced output is noteworthy then we’ll see the creation. It’s two sides of the same coin.

I don’t catch how you correlate destruction and passion though. Would you like to elaborate?

I don't think of it as "destruction" so much as "consumption." And there's no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

Moreover, even with a very generous definition of "destruction," the comparison should still be made to what would've been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn't made the sauce, what would've happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.

I read a fantastic book not maybe five years ago it so titled the creative destruction of medicine which touches quite well on how a lot of medicine has to fundamentally change and it's happening through a lot of destruction. If you find the field of medicine interesting or want to know what the next few decades likely have in store, I'd recommend the book.

Consider basic physics too and the concept of entropy. Any act to order something takes energy. All physical things continually tend to disorder. So distruction in the physical sense is a natural process. It is creation and ordering that is miraculous. However that ordering has side effects in that it requires destruction of some other ordering.

Where passion comes in. Well a few ways. First in the end creation requires willing something into existence. Second blind passion can have undesirable side effects on you and the world around you.

My only point is that what your talking about has a basis in science as well and the fundamental laws of our universe.

I forget which book, but Nietzsche refers to this paradox as "the artist of violence". The idea being that originally, things were created out of raw chaos; after that, you need to deconstruct something to create something new. Either way, it's violence: the imposition of one's will onto something else.

Now, Nietzsche said a lot of shit, so take this with a grain of salt; but this is one of the concepts that stick with me, for the same reason you've got this question bugging you. How do we balance our very human urge to create with an ethical imperative against violence?

I settled on not using violence that harms other humans, which is kind of extreme. But creativity thrives on constraints, right?

You have to answer the question yourself, though, of how far you're willing to go, how much destruction you're willing to cause, to create what's important to you.

Destruction is not required unless the new construct is directly contrasting to the existing. Even if it is contrasting, parralel construction can exist in many cases.