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Why would the inverse of the United States be other countries or Americans? Couldn't it just as well be fluffy cats, Saharan sand or an Aztec deity?

• vinceguidry 10y ago
  Yes, you can take any context and think about it as the inverse of any other topic. What you get out of this approach is insight through connection, and considering Saharan sand as the inverse of the US doesn't offer any meaningful insights. In fact I came to the realization last night after I worked on that comment, that searching for a thing's converse only really makes sense when the thing has some form of agency. You could perhaps consider the inverse to be "ideas" as America is an idea. You might consider all the different ideas that constitute America, such as individual freedom, meritocracy over hierarchy. Where you get when you go down this road enough times with enough topics, as I did, is that the alternative considerations all belong in the topic's inverse. You get a deep sense for the dividing lines between contexts. Contextual spaces are vast. Perhaps you can find some old apocrypha tying America to an Aztec deity, say Jefferson wrote a reference to one in some legal opinion or whatnot. That would be enough to put Aztec deities into America's inverse. But it wouldn't be very relevant. As I kept working with this, I realized that you need a sense of importance. You're driving towards an insight, and every insight is additive. What you're looking for is classes of things. The history of America, the culture of America, everything you can think about that America is, goes in the inverse. All that combined make up the whole.