“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Emerson
I’ll go one step further and say that all lives are experiments. There are endless infinities standing before us, paths leading through life in every possible way; each of us is here to try one of them. There are two principal reasons why it’s incorrect to always take the lead of others or to ignore your inner voice for the sake of satisfying the demands of others. The first is straightforward: if you’re not living your own life and following your own potential, then whose life are you living? Quieting yourself for the sake of satisfying the arbitrary demands of others is a kind of suicide and slavery and should be avoided by people who believe they are capable of achieving anything at all significant.
The second reason is more abstract but perhaps more significant: if new ideas aren’t considered and attempted, if the experimenting stops, the static framework which results will inevitably crumble. It’s beyond the scope of a short blog post to get into alot of detail, but if you’re willing to indulge me for the sake of a hypothesis (experiment?), take this for granted: the modern American is hyperstimulated, first by media images; and second by other people who, having also been exposed to the same media images, tend to reinforce the media influence on an individual.
The result of this overstimulation is an atrophy of internal thoughts and desires- the self is sacrificed for the sake of social acceptability. This has worked well enough for the past few decades. Ill effects of this situation include strong personalities either becoming alienated or gawked at like zoo animals until they submit to normalcy, depression and suicide becoming more frequent, and counter-culture becoming its own mainstreamed milieu just as stifling to the expression of personality as the TV culture. However, the worst consequences of the herding of America are only just beginning to be felt. The bigger we are, the harder we fall.
When you look at history, the greatest innovations, the longest leaps forward, and the most important solutions come less often from planned and coordinated efforts and more often from individual creative efforts. For example, a small group of technicians in Silicon Valley have created a culture where there is a computer in every home and have allowed me and millions of others to publish our writings online quickly and easily. The human species adapted in a way where a small percentage of the total population was creative and innovative, another percentage can inspire people to follow them, another percentage is careful detail-oriented; together this soup of human ingenuity is capable of conquering any problem.
However, by surrendering our children’s personal growth and development to a television screen, drugging away their unique abilities, and pigeonholing their opinions into select groups of state-approved nonsense, we stand a very real risk of incapacitating the various problem solving segments of our population, like a lobotomy on a national scale. The system has been failing since, at the latest, the 80s; we’ve been able to get by anyway with debt-financing and worldwide optimism about our economic power. Neither of these things will last significantly longer.
If there’s a theme to this blog, it’s that you should NEVER, EVER MESS WITH A COMPLEX SYSTEM. YOU DO NOT AND CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT, NOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.