When you think about it, the two-party political system is ridiculous. How can only two ideologies represent the diversity of outlooks? The third party in this country is not likely to come to power, and the minority parties are even less favoured.

Politics is polarised, i.e. represented by two opposing camps. That is a statement of obvious fact, paralleled in many other countries around the world. It is the modern outcome of social and psychological battles: we are left with only two contrary viewpoints. Why not three, four, or five? Politics is essentially based on a struggle between people who benefit from the status quo and seek to preserve it, and those who are less advantaged or acknowledge its inequalities, and want to change it. Marx's dialectic analysis continues to influence contemporary thinking in diverse ways. Whether we accept his agenda or not, his thesis continues to inform.

Polarity underlies many different areas of life, from the biological and sub-atomic to the metaphysical and philosophical. It is a general principle, that helps us comprehend and locate a wide range of experiences and phenomena. Conservatives want to conserve. Traditionally and historically, they represent the interests of the ruling class, the aristocracy, and the wealthy. All these people have power, influence and property and/or money. Labour represents the interests of the working person who lacks these things; he or she is dependent on being employed by someone who ultimately has interests other than their own financial and vocational well being.

In politics and elsewhere, there are rule makers and rule breakers, conformists and rebels. Some people know how to 'play the game' very well and are thus able to benefit from it. Fundamentally they may or may not be unusually talented; but they do understand the rules and are able to fit in with them, to their own advantage. The public school-Oxbridge formula is a good example. The education you obtain from those places is no doubt very fine and the selection process, for all its inequalities and dubious traditions, does tend to favour the more able. More able, that is, to play the educational game and obtain high-level examination grades. Yet the disproportionate number of public school-Oxbridge people in the best jobs does not indicate greater ability. They are a minority, stacked against vast numbers of talented people from quality university departments around the country. There is no doubt public school-Oxbridge has networking benefits, and beyond that, it instils in people a confidence and self-belief that carries over into professional lives.

I was surprised to discover that at Oxford, you still have to wear a gown and a silly hat when you sit your examinations. I took it for granted that you do sit examinations, and lots of them: that continuous assessment is almost non-existent. Oxford (more so than Cambridge, I believe) is a traditional rule maker.

I was not there in the rule breaking 1960s, but the era's enduring mythology still makes me nostalgic, for what I never experienced. Like the punk rock phase a decade later, it was probably far less exciting and energising than memory suggests. The hippies advocated peace and love - apparently - in both California and Carnaby Street. The punk rockers rejected the bloated arrogance of the music industry, in both New York and London. I suspect the Californians were the true hippies, and their experiments coincided with Timothy Leary, and the innovative psychologies associated with Esalen. Punk rock may have truly started in America (the New York Dolls or possibly even Lou Reed), but it was primarily a London thing. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers and others embodied all the violent dissension. "God save the queen, the fascist regime, they made you a moron, potential H-bomb…. there is no future in England's dreaming".

Then we moved into the nineties, when the trend swung back in favour of conservatism. Thatcher's entrepreneur culture was the dominating zeitgeist; the punk rockers had grown up and been replaced by a proliferation of musical styles. 'House', 'garage', 'indie' and even 'rap' satisfied and embodied the formidable adolescent energies. The drug-fuelled 'rave' phenomenon lacked any ideological basis, other than the attempt to escape responsibility, convention, boredom and unemployment. It did not endure and left no real legacy, unlike the 1960s drug culture.

Anita Roddick's enterprise was and still is a curious blend of the two polar outlooks. She became a very wealthy woman while advocating support for third world countries, natural rather than synthetic products, and fair treatment for its employees. She was a rule breaker who managed to packet and market the iconoclasm in simple plastic bottles. Some critics suggested she was no more than an astute marketer, as if her commercial success indicated her moral failure. It seems to be a peculiarly British trait that successful people are envied and criticised; I doubt if Roddick has been attacked like that in the US. There often is a contradiction between great wealth and ethical endeavour, but one does not necessarily preclude the other and there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking wealth. The old 'starving artist' idea was nothing more than adolescent inexperience, and the two poles of commercial success and ethical practice can be encompassed in a third and more mature intellectual position. You can move beyond thesis and analysis to a position of synthesis, which recognises contradiction but contains it rather than merely adopts one pole or the other.

In the late nineties, the 'dot com' phenomena was essentially a commercial hijacking of a more gentle and utopian enterprise, represented in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTML:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html

The Internet is not generally construed in this way any more. Millions of people use it to shop, swap music, exchange banal conversation and surf around in a random manner. Corporate giants like AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft largely dominate and, sadly, dictate what kind of content is available. Of course it was originally a military concept, but the Internet then became a genteel network used by academics. It is heartening to see that the academic community has recovered its own cutting edge Internet, which in this country is called SuperJanet, and in the US is being called Internet 2. Here you will find academic communities exploring the communication possibilities of a network free from commercial sludge and free from much of the problem of bandwidth limitations. The really clever technical minds are not trying to increase profit; they are engaged with other projects. They are rule breakers, and even though MacDonald's are watching it carefully with notions about video based distance buying, they will not be able to muscle in and clog up the academic bandwidth like they have elsewhere.

I began with politics and finished with the Internet. They are good examples for the operational principle of polarity, where you have two contrary positions or forces. Politics - tragically - is characterised by a feud between two positions. The local car factory says it has to shut down, and the workers protest. The managers and directors are viewing it from an economic strategy viewpoint, in relation to wider market forces and more viable factories in other parts of the country. The workers fail to consider this: that if the factory stays open, the company as a whole could face ruin. The directors, on the other hand are ultimately disinterested in the three hundred workers who have been there for years, and their respective families. Their financial health is not threatened by the situation; on the contrary, they enjoy immense salaries. Is there a third possibility here? I do not know. Perhaps there is, by rethinking the factory operations while closely involving the workers.

There are many more polarities in life, which I will continue to explore. The Internet is a particularly good example of contradictions and ambivalence, and that is my next subject.