Asking people around here in Brazil what was worse for the country, 1964 or 2016. Folks who were alive and grown enough around 1964 are mostly depressed and discouraged - most of them say that 2016 was worse. Of course, these are people I know, and of course are mostly commies or otherwise anarchists or lefties. But this is what matters in my question which can be formulated like this: for those who were utterly aghast and outraged by 1964, how does 2016 feel. One of the reasons why 2016 was worse is that in 1964 there were right-wingers against the coup. In 16 we had none of that. Such polarization left the country without common principles around which to fight and no institutional common denominators. To be sure, it is too soon to make a comparison. But it does feel pretty bleak around here now.
I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
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