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Lucretius

To coin a word: "valash"

Words

Valash (val - ash)

Noun -

1. The state of disagreement over the defining qualities of good and bad as applied to a given object, person, process, or course of action.

2. A clash on the level of fundamental values, as distinguished from a disagreement based upon superficial, logistical, or reconcilable details.

Usage: "The President and the Congress are in deep valash over the deficit."

Origin: The first three letters of the word "value" added to the last three letters of the word "clash".

There is an experience that happens to me several times a year: I go into a store intending to buy a very specific product only to find that it is no longer being offered due to insufficient demand... I was apparently the only person who was buying it. This happens to me so frequently, that I have occasionally pursued the matter further. What I have found is that, often, the reason that I liked the product is exactly the same reason that most people disliked it. For example, I might have liked a variety of salsa because it was very spicy, where-as other people did not buy it because it was very spicy. For me spicy = good. In this, I clash with the majority for whom spicy = bad. This is a simple example of valash.

Not all fundamental differences are matters of valash. If you ask a dedicated Linux user, he'll tell you that a good computer interface is based around the command line, and might wax eloquent about the bash shell. If you ask a Windows power-user the same question, its even money that he'd forget that the command-line is even part of the computer's shell at all. Both of them are sophisticated users well beyond the point-and-clicker level of proficiency, but they have fundamentally different ideas of what a program should look like. However, they both will agree that a good computer interface should provide fast efficient access to files, folders, and programs. Because their methods diverge so greatly, their preferred tools diverge in fundamental ways, but their standards of a "good" interface or a "bad" interface are the same (speed and efficiency), just the logistical details are different (key-strokes, menus, mouse clicks, etc).

The idea, that "good" is not a constant between two different people is really quite a basic fact of everyday life, and yet, we tend to be blind to it. Most people act as if two different sides of an argument always agree about what is good, and are just disagreeing about method, or circumstances. The truth is that valash is at the very heart of many fundamental disagreements. Look at healthcare. Right-wingers believe that "good" healthcare is first and foremost something that allows independence and self-sufficiency for the patient so that the patient will not be under the thumb of hospital bureaucrat or government bureaucrats. Right-wingers tend to over-look the fact that the patient has that independence because he has money, and that he in turn gets that money from his job to which he therefore has a level of dependence. Left-wingers believe that "good" healthcare should, before all else, be provided in a fair and equal manner, regardless of social or economic factors, so that the patient will not be under the economic thumb of his employer or lack there-of. They forget that such fair distribution must be administered by a government to which the patient is now dependent. These goals of the two sides, in the case of healthcare, may be reconcilable, but the valash... the difference of opinion on what constitutes "good" in this context, is largely irreconcilable. It is a clash of values rather than a clash of logistics. I have invented the word valash, because I believe that disagreements, whether they be big (healthcare) or small (salsa) can not be reconciled unless the under-lying clashes in the values of the disagreeing parties be exposed and openly acknowledged by all sides. Only then, can a compromise be formulated.

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