ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how dialectical thinking can help us locate persistent problems in some institutions —family, economy, and government —and help us or someone to devise solutions. Knowing about dialectic should lessen the surprise and facilitate recognition of one's own onesideness. Knowing about dialectic can sensitize a person to the dominance–submission relationship and its instability. The dialectic of the family has gradually, over centuries, produced the changes in women that induced them to struggle for redefined family roles. The dialectic is the community–individuality contradiction. A large, global dialectical reversal is possible some day, and a dialectical thinker might see signs of its approach and hope to participate. But to hasten the presumed process along by staging a revolution would be disastrous. It should be clear by that there can be no "great leap forward" to pure capitalism, or pure Muslim fundamentalism, or any other Utopia.
