Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Richard Merrick
Normal kills outliers. We see it all the time. Normal is the more than death of creativity. It is death, on a cellular level, of those so creative they can't live a life focused on recreating or regurgitating the work of others. Normal can do this. Creatives must create their own thing. We seem to have forgotten this. We have pathologized the one thing that carries the whole society forward.
The inability to create, in your gifted space or start on the journey to find out what that is, drives chronic illness, neurodivergent disorders, mental illness, and all the pressure related disorders. I know this because my family is the most creative. They are savants and they die young and painfully as all of these things converge.
In our hierarchical societies the creatives are shamed and prevented from being what they naturally are. I believe this is why the gifted communities were made. To save the creatives from turmoil and early death and in turn save society. But the gifted leaders were eventually replaced by society "deemed experts" on giftedness. These experts, who were now closer to normal, misunderstood or forgot the gifted group's purpose.
The current gifted leaders don't understand the value of creativity unless it is related to production of a thing. They focused on identifying the math and science gifted. Not cultivating it, just identifying and harnessing it. They neglected the humanities, music and arts and all the others gifted. Without sensitive, kind, humanities gifted people in leadership the society grows ill. The focus becomes on a destruction and consumption cycle. They forget about creating and growing and replacing. That can be done later. Later must mean after the society collapses, I guess.
The current leaders say we need the creatives because the future is changing so quickly. Yet the response has been to oppress them with greater and greater intensity. Those that can't be controlled are destroyed, discarded and left wallowing. The need for control must be addictive. As the leaders of our society get stressed they do the worst thing they could do. They try to make the creatives act normal.
Societies use hierarchy and competition to harness the value of normal. But this does not work for the creatives. Greed and scarcity gradually increases the need for the creatives. They must be brought in to figure out how to fix the issues society has created. But the (non-gifted) leaders use the rules that worked for normal. The results are disastrous. Instead of producing, the creatives, defined by their ability to introspect, turn on themselves and implode. The powerful double down controlling them. They try to force the giftedness out of the creatives. The creative implosion magnifies and society destroys their own chances at surviving the change.
This repeated cycle of increasing shortsightedness has probably killed all civilizations when compared to all other factors. One size fits all, eventually destroys all. Think I am lying. Go read any religious text and you will see they blame the creatives/neurodivergent for the down fall of society. But they were never the ones in charge. They were simply brought in at the end to try to save the flailing empires.
Beautifully and passionately put. John Bagot Gludds work on the fall of Empires (a source of inspiration that surprised me) identifies decadence as the final stage before collapse, and Margaret Wheatley, in "who do we choose to be" extends that thinking.
In the end, "they" are neither interested, or capable of saving us. We have become domesticated, and need to rediscover our wild side, and the power of real community.
Societal homeostasis seems a natural and useful dynamic that probably served our ancestral tribal lives quite well - cultural feedback loops in a self-regulating system to ensure cohesion, stability and security. But when this proclivity to normal is scaled and empowered through a modern technocracy with global reach we are left with a stifling monoculture that limits our other uniquely human qualities of curiosity, experimentation, and adaptability. The fact that normal can be so easily systematised and mechanised to serve the profit and control seeking technocracy, which then becomes the newly accepted normal, should be raising alarm bells.
Well put. We seem to be moving to a neofeudal society, with an appointed, increasingly hereditary aristocracy and digital squirearchy. It should be bothering us....
Normal kills outliers. We see it all the time. Normal is the more than death of creativity. It is death, on a cellular level, of those so creative they can't live a life focused on recreating or regurgitating the work of others. Normal can do this. Creatives must create their own thing. We seem to have forgotten this. We have pathologized the one thing that carries the whole society forward.
The inability to create, in your gifted space or start on the journey to find out what that is, drives chronic illness, neurodivergent disorders, mental illness, and all the pressure related disorders. I know this because my family is the most creative. They are savants and they die young and painfully as all of these things converge.
In our hierarchical societies the creatives are shamed and prevented from being what they naturally are. I believe this is why the gifted communities were made. To save the creatives from turmoil and early death and in turn save society. But the gifted leaders were eventually replaced by society "deemed experts" on giftedness. These experts, who were now closer to normal, misunderstood or forgot the gifted group's purpose.
The current gifted leaders don't understand the value of creativity unless it is related to production of a thing. They focused on identifying the math and science gifted. Not cultivating it, just identifying and harnessing it. They neglected the humanities, music and arts and all the others gifted. Without sensitive, kind, humanities gifted people in leadership the society grows ill. The focus becomes on a destruction and consumption cycle. They forget about creating and growing and replacing. That can be done later. Later must mean after the society collapses, I guess.
The current leaders say we need the creatives because the future is changing so quickly. Yet the response has been to oppress them with greater and greater intensity. Those that can't be controlled are destroyed, discarded and left wallowing. The need for control must be addictive. As the leaders of our society get stressed they do the worst thing they could do. They try to make the creatives act normal.
Societies use hierarchy and competition to harness the value of normal. But this does not work for the creatives. Greed and scarcity gradually increases the need for the creatives. They must be brought in to figure out how to fix the issues society has created. But the (non-gifted) leaders use the rules that worked for normal. The results are disastrous. Instead of producing, the creatives, defined by their ability to introspect, turn on themselves and implode. The powerful double down controlling them. They try to force the giftedness out of the creatives. The creative implosion magnifies and society destroys their own chances at surviving the change.
This repeated cycle of increasing shortsightedness has probably killed all civilizations when compared to all other factors. One size fits all, eventually destroys all. Think I am lying. Go read any religious text and you will see they blame the creatives/neurodivergent for the down fall of society. But they were never the ones in charge. They were simply brought in at the end to try to save the flailing empires.
And we are doing it again.
Beautifully and passionately put. John Bagot Gludds work on the fall of Empires (a source of inspiration that surprised me) identifies decadence as the final stage before collapse, and Margaret Wheatley, in "who do we choose to be" extends that thinking.
In the end, "they" are neither interested, or capable of saving us. We have become domesticated, and need to rediscover our wild side, and the power of real community.
I look forward to talking.....
Societal homeostasis seems a natural and useful dynamic that probably served our ancestral tribal lives quite well - cultural feedback loops in a self-regulating system to ensure cohesion, stability and security. But when this proclivity to normal is scaled and empowered through a modern technocracy with global reach we are left with a stifling monoculture that limits our other uniquely human qualities of curiosity, experimentation, and adaptability. The fact that normal can be so easily systematised and mechanised to serve the profit and control seeking technocracy, which then becomes the newly accepted normal, should be raising alarm bells.
Well put. We seem to be moving to a neofeudal society, with an appointed, increasingly hereditary aristocracy and digital squirearchy. It should be bothering us....