Representing impasses, such as the difficulty of decision or the indecision that implies the impossibility to realize, constitutes the paradox represented by polarization. Certain social and philosophical impasses can be considered taking the donkey as an inspiring metaphor.

In the fable of the Smart Donkeys, two donkeys tied by a short rope see two bales of hay on opposite sides and, trying to eat them, the animals remain paralyzed by the stretched rope, pulling it by the ends to which they are bound - each one wants to fulfill its own motivations, to satiate its own hunger. Seeking to reach the hay, the grass, they fight without reaching it, without realizing that they are tied in the same loop, in the same rope. They find the solution by going together to the hay.

Commitment generates polarization, conflicts and struggles that can only be resolved when the knots are unleashed, when what binds and separates is removed. To be free is to be able to follow one’s own path and not be induced, manipulated by hunger, by contingent needs, through arbitrary and biased paths.

The philosopher Buridan (14th century) is credited with the discussion of free will expressed in the paradox known as Buridan’s Donkey, which has the image of a donkey who, feeling hunger and thirst at the same time, hesitates between the hay bale and the barrel of water. Unable to decide for one or the other, the animal dies at the end. It is an example of the inability to decide between two behaviors when one feels motivated in favor of one and the other.

The donkey is also a biblical character illuminated by the triumphant entry into Jerusalem leading Jesus, being further known as the classic “pack-donkey”, the stubborn, the hard-to-assimilate, and the usual transport of Palestinians, Arabs, and Brazilian ‘Northeasterns’.

There is no polarization, there are no antagonisms when possibilities are considered. Polarizations result from magnetized fragmentation. Putting pieces together creates cohesion poles that are independent of what is happening, since they are previously determined by interests unrelated to the antagonisms themselves. Polarizing is always an artifice that hides other realities, is creating false antagonism and thus establishing places considered good and bad, varying according to what is observed. This apparent quantum reality subtracts densities, particularities, encompasses everything while propitiating other visualizations, other purposes. There is no good or evil, there is no “right” or “left”; what exists is a phenomenal continuity of variations that cannot be reduced to dilemmas. It is necessary to get out of the polarization so that the data, the continuum process, can be found.

In the case of Brazil, in recent political polarizations, the question is not the good or bad. The question is what will allow equality, freedom, or what will not allow them. It is what will not increase ethnic, social, sexual, and economic discrimination. It is what will allow to be with the other as freedom to come and go, without hitches or discontinuing impediments. This finding avoids falling into immobilizations like those of the Smart Donkeys and Buridan's Donkey.

Fighting for democracy, for the equal distribution of rights and duties, is what is demanded. Clichés, half-truths, and laws that allow one to choose who dies, who lives, who is human, who is worm, who is parasite always generate concentration camps, extermination camps, torture camps. Opposing positions are needed, lucidity and constant struggle are necessary for the maintenance of civilizational achievements and the eradication of barbarism.