Nature vs. Nurture - a War
August 17. Welcome. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s get smarter together.
First of, a bit of housekeeping. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to sleep-away summer camp aka I’ll spend some time at my grandparents’ where I always feel like I’m twelve years old again. I’m not sure what’s going on with their internet because you can watch movies and livestreams just fine, but uploading even a five minute video takes an hour at least and I do upload the video of the post to more than one platform. All that to say, I’ve decided not to do it this time around. I’ll take a break until I’m back. All I might post are videos from the summer garden at it’s best, what always means a hint of decay and death is in the mix. What gets me nicely to today’s topic, which is based on a conversation I had with my dad yesterday.
It started during a news item on the local news about the immanent closure of a well-known club that happens to be in my neighborhood. The landlord isn’t renewing their renting contract what’s only logical because the people wanting to open a club only got hold of this particular property because it was marked for another, long-term project already and no one else had agreed to develop something there that would be doomed from the beginning. But those are ideal conditions for a club where artists wanted to explore and be inspired by the new energy until it wasn’t new anymore and they would move on. The problem now is, that once the artist had moved on, the club remained a money making machine – albeit on a smaller scale, but that’s still big enough for the renters – by exploiting the name and existing information in the shape of music and drinks.
It’s a problem that becomes especially apparent in the arts in general. They are closest to what the power of our mind is – imagination, taking a few data points that stick out and creating a whole model of the world from them. It’s as random a process as can be and thus feels so rewarding as random searches offer the highest payoff, the most insight. But they also carry the highest risk of failure, of the model not creating the right pattern of energy that works out and interacts with other humans. So, whoever has money as their goal, a story of our own creation, and not finding the insight, the rearrangement of the pattern that we are that sets free the energy that allows our growth, will look to avoid the risk and the insecurity where the highest payoff will show up, by recycling what has worked once, by exploiting existing information, by standardization.
That’s what happened in the book industry, but also the movie industry, e.g. Today, every book is written and edited in such a way that the story is split into eight equal parts and in each part something very specific has to happen inside the character and in the world around them. Furthermore, now your book has to resemble other books that came shortly before. It’s said that’s because the customer wants it. But in reality, the customer has been trained to want this because this standardization and exploitation of existing knowledge assures the publishers that whatever payoff will happen, will go to them. They stirred this process to a place that it has become so standardized that basically machines can take over – AI. And to a place where their product, and everyone’s who is trying to be seen on the market, doesn’t work to sate the needs of humans.
Because people today have been conditioned to find safety in standards up to the point that they fear and reject the different and new that humans are meant to seek out. And this starts in schools – not without reason an invention of the Mesopotamians in Uruk who also introduced standardized work hours and standardized products and thus the concept of exploitation of existing knowledge – menial work. We went through a lot more attempted and successful hacks of the human world generation protocol to enable some people to fulfill their imaginary goals, but schools in particular and the access to knowledge and information in general was only ever more geared towards what these people need from the rest. Today, when we ask about the success of our education system, the only consideration is given to employers and sellers. Does a school produce what they need – people that exploit a small set of existing knowledge to their advantage and consume standardized products and services when they are not? That’s success. Do we rearrange the patterns that we are through the interactions so the material things inside us reach lower energy states and energy is set free that allows us to grow? Not a relevant consideration because for the benefit of the few it is best when everyone else best rejects the different and new in any shape and form and remains an observer not an exploring participant.
Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again – in a week or so – at the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
#science #history #reality #school #education #arts #music #books #publishing #WorldGeneration #fear #standards #mind #self #brain #thinking #explore
