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In this metallic era of barbarians, only methodically and excessively cultivating our abilities to dream, to analyze, and to attract can safeguard our personality from disintegrating into nothing or into something commonplace.Those parts of our experiences which are real are precisely those that are felt by others. Reality is composed of all that is in common in our experiences. Thus our individuality lies only in the parts that are erroneous. How happy I would be to see, one day, a scarlet sun. It would be so mine, this sun, no one's but mine!
Fernando Pessoa died in 1935. Apparently people have been worrying about the effect of the information revolution on individuality since well before it started. I wonder what people were saying after the printing press appeared. Probably they had different concerns then; I don't know if individuality had been invented. Perhaps it was invented in response to the possibility of making exact copies of things.
But if as the exchange of information becomes more efficient we lose more and more of our individuality, does this mean, given this definition, that the boundaries of reality are constantly expanding? I suppose so, if you grant the reality of memes.
I remember once consoling someone who was distressed about having experiences she could not convey to others, telling her that she should cherish them as something uniquely her own.
This reminds me of some rambling with Chris Beck back Sophomore year. Something like "We can only communicate experiences to the extent that they are non-unique, and the fact that we are having this conversation indicates that a huge portion of our brains have identical abstract structure". I guess Mr. Soares beat us to that one ( and probably others before him ). I don't understand why thoughts like this aren't universally introduce in first grade, though perhaps they wouldn't make sense at that time.
ReplyDeleteSo this implies that "consensus reality" is hardly anything more than the portions of our selves that are not of ourselves ?
ReplyDeleteI guess that would require a definition of "self" which implies a particular philosophy. This business is confusing, I see why people stick to mathematics.
ReplyDeletealso, back link to http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2010/03/so-i-had-interesting-discussion-with.html
ReplyDeleteEverett says, I don't understand why thoughts like this aren't universally introduce in first grade, though perhaps they wouldn't make sense at that time.
ReplyDelete@Everett
So for some reason they (the K-12 educational establishment) seem really focused on, even through high school, telling Children that they are all special and unique? I remember a whole lot of posters to this effect. I remember also this exercise where we all fold up paper and cut it to make "snowflakes", which are all different and this is the same way that we are all unique.
It could be that, without the belief that they are unique, children cannot believe that they can be innovative?
Also, it may be fundamentally antisocial to assume that people might not be unique. If there are "replacements" or "expendable people" then genocide and murder become less reprehensible.
I was taught that individualism is one of distinctive components of the Enlightenment. I don't know how non-Western schools address these issues. Do kids in China grow up being told they are all unique and special snowflakes?
So I mean the other thing about this is, if you fill kids heads with institutional bullshit like this, it actually gives society great cohesiveness, because everyone can rally around rejecting the institutional bullshit. Rapidly as they grow older, kids reject this kind of programming... real snowflakes are basically indistinguishable for all intents and purposes, and the only distinguishing characteristics in the crystaline structure are the defects. Even the rate of defects should be roughly constant. Is this what we want to tell kids, you are all unique in the same way that, McDonalds happy meal toys are so badly manufactured that they all contain noticeable defects that make them distinct from each other?
I mean this kind of thought is the basis for jokes. This kind of anti-establishment cynical sentiment is something that Americans come to rally around -- liberal or conservative is largely about which particular government entities do you abhor the most.
It could be that a crucial part of successful social programming is not, the repetition of instructions for behavior thousands and thousands of times (ala Brave New World or 1984, like "Alphas Betas and Gammas all stick to their class! If you feel sad, take Soma (crack??)"), but rather, the repetition of instructions that we wish to be rejected. "We are all unique individual snow flakes!" (when older, the child thinks critically about this. Are we really? Perhaps this reinforces class prejudice and distinction.) "This is your brain on drugs! (egg breaks)" This commercials are proven to actually increase incidence rate of drug abuse. Are we to conclude that, the truly Orwellian society uses reverse psychology in its suggestions? And of course as I was saying before, as the population ages, this reverse psychology approach allows the people to rally each around their individual discovery that the "programming" was bullshit.
Back to what Feddy was saying more, I think that, beyond just observing the contention between individuality and conformity, we need to make a clear and precise argument for how we justify individuality as a goal. I believe I personally support it, but I'm not sure I can even begin to articulate why. It has obvious benefits to oneself - individuality is essentially related to ones ability to produce novelty, the food we all crave and which so many seem to be starving for. If a person can act as a source of novelty, they can rapidly make friends and ensure their own survival in lieu of all most anything else. Moreover they can hope to feed themselves in this regard as well.
ReplyDeleteIn the extreme however, excessive and compulsively seeking to develop individuality would seem to be pointless and antisocial. The endless churning of the fashion world, while perhaps providing some small bit of novelty, would seem to me (perhaps this is unfair but I'll throw it out there anyhow) to be an outlet of young people trying to be "distinctive" but not knowing any good way to do it, and so misguidedly seeking to just spend money to "acquire" individuality.
Perhaps individuality is not something one should seek to develop as a skill - perhaps this is not the right way to think about it. It would seem to be the kind of thing where, if you are seeking it explicitly, that means you don't have it, perhaps? Perhaps there is nothing one can do or say from a policy or philosophical perspective that changes any of this, so it isn't worth talking about.
It occurs to me now that so much of this blog seems to me in some sense typical adolescent talk, about what individuality means, coming to terms with identity stuff. I wonder if this is how we will look back on it in the future, if we will say, there was something different going on here, or if this is just young people going through the usual motions of growing up and becoming mentally mature. When its something as emotionally charged and angst-prone as individuality / identity, I think there is great potential to fall into this category.
Not that that means we shouldn't do it. It is slightly troubling that after 22 years of being a person, I can't say for sure how I justify something we all seem to have been taught / agreed with, "individuality is a good thing and worth fighting for" or something along those lines, or further if I play the champion or the skeptic on this one.
So, the fact that Mr. Soares took time to articulate this particular component of [becoming mentally mature], combined with the fact that our culture still remembers his statement ( and took the effort to translate it across languages ) suggests to me that this statement, is, in fact, still novel to many people.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we could try to distinguish between several possibilities :
the statement is not novel, but for some reason we happen to attribute it to this person
the statement is simply a particularly eloquent articulation of something everyone inherently comes to understand
the statement was legitimately novel to many people and the fact that you think it is not makes you some sort of mutant
the statement is novel to many people and the fact that you think it is not means that the statement has somehow permeated your local culture to become a self evident fact.
um... this is likely an incomplete enumeration, but I seem to have forgotten why I am typing this.
Also, no, who actually tries to use systematic reverse psychology when raising a kid ? Not just "you can have all the cookies you want" but systematic indoctrination of opposing belief systems under the assumption that the next generation will converge onto you true belief system in an act of rebellion ? I mean, if this is in fact the goal, its working rather poorly in conservative america.
ReplyDeleteoh, but with respect to "is this blog producing novelty" ... no, I don't think so. The traffic analysis suggests that almost none of our post are suprathreshold in Internet terms. In case you were curious, the only posts getting significant traffic are
ReplyDelete-- F's post on the Yup'ik (I submitted this one to Digg)
-- Biff's Mechanization of Man (Biff's boss linked this post in a higher profile forum)
-- The 'how to build goggles post' (Make website picked this up as a link once and it got a smattering of hit)
Everything else seems to just be viewed by the editors, a handful of people who follow or regularly visit, and then random people who stumble blindly over here from other parts of the internet.
So yeah, your [just young people going through the usual motions of growing up and becoming mentally mature] comment seems to be largely accurate ? maybe ?
oh, but with respect to "is this blog producing novelty?" ... no, I don't think so. The traffic analysis suggests that almost none of our posts are suprathreshold in Internet terms. In case you were curious, the only posts getting significant traffic are :
ReplyDelete-- F's post on the Yup'ik (I submitted this one to Digg)
-- Biff's Mechanization of Man (Biff's boss linked to this post in a higher profile forum)
-- The 'how to build goggles post' (Make website picked this up as a link once and it got a smattering of hits)
Everything else seems to just be viewed by the editors, a handful of people who follow or regularly visit, and then random people who stumble blindly over here from other parts of the internet. So yeah, your [just young people going through the usual motions of growing up and becoming mentally mature] comment seems to be largely accurate ? maybe ?
So producing novel ideas isn't... well, to put it vulgarly, it isn't what makes you famous. In science, you have to put those ideas to the test. Anywhere else, you have to execute them and present them well. This is why accusations like "Harry Potter was actually my idea" are dumb. So what if it was? It was also a bunch of other people's idea, and you didn't manage to make a bestseller out of it.
ReplyDeleteSo my awkward translation of the Fernando Pessoa quote is not a good example of an idea. The original quote, perhaps, is.
Also, Beck, the uniqueness in schools thing seems to be a product of the same impulse that focuses so much on building kids' self-esteem. I'm guessing it arose as a pedagogical fashion sometime in the 80's or 90's. (Ah, here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem#Self-esteem.2C_grades_and_relationships )
As for fashion, it's precisely the sort of construction-block individuality (which we remember as what we were told in school was a person's "identity" which was more or less an intersection of herds) that Pessoa excluded.
As for this social cohesiveness you talk about, doesn't it come about because people have these shared memories, regardless of whether they all put the same (or any) valence on them, from the gullible Sherpajacks to the knee-jerk skeptical Chris Becks?
For what it's worth, Pessoa's precise statement (the second half) was new to me and I found it elegant and surprising, but I was more surprised at how old the first half turned out to be.
As for developing individuality as a goal -- well you're right that it's good for the individual in moderation, beyond which the individual becomes lonely or insane. I can also argue for it from a totally collectivist perspective: individuality is a safeguard against social disease, sort of like genetic variability is a safeguard against physical epidemics. Totalitarian societies have failed because they discouraged thinking about their survival.
Is it part of growing up to realize that the individual human is not really a neatly delineated unit of anything? Perhaps if that were true Hofstadter would not have been so long-winded in explaining it. In general the further we go in modifying our environment the less our intuitive ideas of the way the world works are relevant.