When one constructs a position, an argument, it most definitely takes on the vulnerability of an erected structure standing in free space, and what structure there is necessarily entails weakness and points of vulnerability. Much safer to prostrate oneself in the primordial mud and refuse to take a position at all.
But of course even the refusal to make a stand is itself a stand, just as resigning oneself to a contemptuous state of cynicism and refusing to believe in anything figures as taking a stand.
The very condition of being human involves taking a stand, however involuntarily. Here we are, expanding out desperately as life, spiraling out from the Big Bang, one great continuous explosion, twisting, multiplying and evolving inexorably outward. There is no going back, and there is no giving up. One is plunged into the universe and one is compelled by the will to live to keep moving forward, which necessarily means taking up space as a human being, and thus taking a stand as one.
Most people are perfectly comfortable with being what they are and assembling their ideology (or receiving a preassembled one) which reflects that state of being, and then asserting their own being without giving anything a second thought, even when they come up against limits to their own personal expansion, whether conflict is experienced or not. Others still are blown outside the circuits of convention, and both upon apprehending the nature and shape of the conventional circuit from the outside, and wishing to rejoin the humanity they are severed from, fashion ideologies that rearrange the interaction and dynamics of society.
Everyone is necessarily what one is, and that is fine.
But there is a certain freedom that comes with rational and abstract thought (even to choose to give up on some of the complexity, and pay more attention to one's emotions and the surrounding universe is a rational choice). One can, in a limited way, alter the conditions for one's own behavior and part of the trajectory of one's life by exercising carefully one's rational faculties, and choose not just the blueprints for one's behavior but the blueprints that sympathetic others can collectively agree on to be guided by. And so, one's self-reflective decision as to the nature of what one is and the person one should be is very much a part of what one ultimately is.
I'd like to suggest that today, life affirmation - or the ability to say yes to one's own existence and embrace it enthusiastically - is important as ever, even in the individual sense. However, equally important, and culturally ignored to our own detriment, is the affirmation of the greater fabric of existence that one is necessarily bound to, and which is inseparable from one's own individuality. One is bound to one's land, people, culture, nation, class, etc, by virtue of being shaped and molded by those relations, and all of those others are shaped and molded in turn by their relations to you and their relations to the greater aggregate.
One can choose separation or love, riches or poverty, domination or submission, or any other state within the continuum of those concepts, or even alternate between states yearly, monthly, daily, or hourly. But when one chooses separation, one's environment and relations separate back in return; when one chooses riches, there is someone or something else which is impoverished in return; when one chooses domination, another has to necessarily submit in return, and so on. When one chooses one's own individual arrangement, one is essentially choosing the corresponding arrangements in one's relations as well.
In an era of imbalance - I'll get to that later - this principle is essential.
