A-Ha! Oceans of Logic
Everyone knows ‘Take on Me.’ If you don’t know it, Google it. If you do know it, Google it anyway, that song is great. Or actually, don’t worry about it, we got the video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914
For me, the song always brings back memories of Sunday morning breakfasts at my aunt’s house in California, sitting on the porch and chatting about life, the universe, and everything. But this is supposed to be a philosophy article, so I won’t go too deep into my reminisces.
Although we could spend a lot of time analyzing the cryptic grammar of the song’s title, the most philosophically interesting part for my purposes is a single line at the end of the last verse: “it’s no better to be safe than sorry.” Here Morten Harket just flies in the face of conventional wisdom and boldly proclaims that it’s actually NOT better to be safe than sorry. Usually when people say controversial things like this, they provide a little bit of reasoning. But Harket is above such petty things as reason, so he just drops this bomb and goes straight to the chorus, leaving us to figure out what exactly he might mean.
Luckily, you have me to help you sort it out.
First, let’s lay out the different perspectives on safe vs sorry. You could, as the saying goes, think it’s better to be safe than sorry. That is, you could spend energy taking precautions so you won’t end up suffering later when some unlucky thing happens. Alternatively, you could do the direct opposite and claim that it’s better to be sorry than safe. In other words, it’s better to take risks and live hard than to spend all your time trying to figure out the safe path. Though this latter viewpoint may not be enshrined in an idiom (unless you count YOLO), it’s a common idea and you’ll find it in all types of books and movies. Just think of any story where the main character plays it too safe and has to learn that nothing good in life comes without some risk.
But Harket’s claim in Take on Me is interesting because it actually doesn’t fall into either of these two camps. One could read it as just a denial that safe is better than sorry. But the more interesting way to understand it is as a claim that neither is better than the other. Safe is no better than sorry, but sorry is no better than safe. But how could that work?
Well, if you actually sit and think about it, playing it safe in life actually involves taking significant risk. And at the same time, people who put themselves out there and take real risks are playing it safe in their own way. So it turns out that safe IS sorry and sorry IS safe. Or, to leave the idiom behind, taking risks is a safe bet, and playing it safe is risky.
Let’s take a look at why this is the case. First off, people who play it safe end up closing themselves off to a huge number of opportunities, especially emotionally-intense opportunities. This, after all, is the moral of all those movies where the stick-in-the-mud protagonist learns to live life to the fullest. Staying safe, then, is taking a risk; it’s betting that all those missed opportunities are actually not worthwhile at all. Falling in love, traveling to strange places, quitting your job to chase your dreams, none of it really pays off — that’s what you’re saying when you choose the safe path, and in doing so you risk missing out on all the ways in which life really can pay off.
At the same time, people who are avid risk takers, who go all-in on all their relationships, who quit their jobs to travel the world, who try hard to live life to the fullest… well actually they’re just playing it safe. You’ll even hear these people say stuff like “I just don’t want to have any regrets.” In other words, they’re doing all this to minimize the risk of having to look back on a life unlived, on chances not taken. By chasing their unlikely ambitions and throwing their hearts around they make sure that they’ll be safe from having to worry that they didn’t give it their all.
The bottom line of all this is that there isn’t any real difference between playing it safe or playing it sorry. Both lifestyles involve risk, and both lifestyles involve safety. You’ll always be safe in one way or another, whether it’s safe from the hollowness of a controlled lifestyle or safe from heartbreak and bankruptcy. And on a more depressing note, it turns out there’s really no way to avoid being sorry. You’ll either regret not having kept a steady job and stable lifestyle or you’ll regret not seeing the world and chasing the ones you loved. Regret and security are omnipresent in life, but it’s up to you to choose what you’ll regret and what you’ll feel safe about. That’s the real message of Take on Me, that’s what Harket is talking about when he says he’s “slowly learning that life is ok.”
Having said all this about A-ha’s classic song, I want to take a moment to zoom out and comment on the mode of reasoning we employed here. Unlike most traditional argumentation, we didn’t present a pair of opposed ideas, argue why one side must be wrong, and then conclude that the other is the truth. Instead, we took our opposed ideas and saw how in fact each of them blurs with the other, so that there isn’t any real distinction between them after all.
This style of reasoning has a logic all its own: oceanic logic. Oceanic logic, first described as a logic in its own right by Ermanno Bencivenga, is a pattern of reasoning that seeks to undermine oppositions. In so doing, it reveals that both sides of an opposed pair exist along a gradient and cannot be strictly separated. Like waves in the ocean, both sides of the debate are actually just manifestations of the same core phenomena, and it’s impossible to really tell where one ends and the other begins.
I could go on about this kind of logic, it’s historical exemplars, and it’s comparison to other forms for ages but we’re already running a little long. So for now, I’ll just note that since oceanic logic aims at seeing underlying unity between apparently opposed opinions, it’s a form of logic uniquely suited to helping opposing parties see each other’s perspectives and reconcile. So next time you find yourself in an argument, you could try to ask yourself — is it possible that the different things we want are actually one and the same?
