The pendulum swings

I am grateful to Anu Garg and his wordsmith.org website for this single word which sums up a phenomenon observed by many of us involved in politics.

enantiodromia

PRONUNCIATION:

(i-nan-tee-uh-DROH-mee-uh) 

MEANING:

noun: The tendency of things, beliefs, etc., to change into their opposites.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek enantio- (opposite) + dromos (running). Earliest documented use: 1917.

NOTES:

You can keep going up a mountain, but once you hit the peak you can only go down. A pendulum moves in one direction, but once it has reached its rightmost it travels left. So it goes with beliefs, ideologies, and politics, apparently. Once we have elected a black man as a president, we have to pick someone with a long sordid record of discrimination.

The concept of enantiodromia is attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE). Later it was discussed by the psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) as “the principle which governs all cycles of natural life”.

USAGE:

“The union that Philip Murray had founded in 1936 as a way of combatting the wretched excess of management had come full circle in the cycle of enantiodromia, and had fallen victim to its own wretched excess.”
Tom O’Boyle; Excess, the Golden Rule; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Sep 4, 1994