When you take a conversation to its semantic and syntactic limits then step out into the abstract — away from the expected language order — it can create confusion, frustration, and even alienation. Don’t all great films begin with no clear context or explanation? Clear storylines crystalize and take form organically through attentive observation and joint dialogue. Dialogue between the characters inside the film guides the direction, and dialogue between those watching and analyzing from outside the film expands the direction. The more shared discussions arise around the ideas, meaning, production style and original novel, the more meta-content clusters around the film — the shared experience. With richer and more open content, viewers gain access to deeper context — when compared to the first few minutes of a new reel. Psychological thrillers like Inception (2010) and timeless movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), tap our emotions and suspend us with cliffhangers — but is the viewership as patient as the previous black and white era? Have we traded reflective thought and contemplation for convenience, efficiency and on-demand-everything?
All the stuff of life lies outside our limited observable — and mentally constructed model — of subjective reality. How can we have mutually objective conversations about events if our views and capacities to absorb, understand and connect are so diametrically opposed — by individual nature. Hidden (and not so hidden messages) in our movies repeat this story over and over. In isolation there’s no clarity, in selfishness there’s no abundance, in arrogance there’s no understanding. The movie, Arrival (2016) was a metaphor — built on previous theatrical metaphors — that repeat the Babylonian civilization story. We humans speak in many tongues and are separated so that we may rediscover ourselves and bridge the humanitarian gaps by communication. We have different perspectives, ideas and realizations, so that we may share to build a clearer collective vision of the whole.
Currently we’re being bombarded by COVID-19 peak infection models for every country. But that’s exactly the problem. They’re models, simulations, man-made equations — not actualizations of the mathematically known universe and its ordered chaos. So what’s to be said about our make-believe market models and the fantasy of infinite financial growth — where the line between real markets and virtual markets continues to blur and merge into the same pool. Limited perspectives and imaginary systems are breaking under the force of their own flawed phantasmagoria. The economic dream is rising to a new logical layer in the system. Those who don’t board the train (and there have been many) to the next platform will be left behind in limbo, under the limitations of economic and mental models that are obviously broken.
If we continue to silence, push back, and argue against new variables of observable reality that dismantle the culturally fixed narrative, we cannot progress. We fall prey to practices of the dark ages. Maverick luminaries who pushed the culture to new horizons and understandings were silenced, exiled or at worst, killed — but their enlightening humanitarian messages outlive their mortality. Social, reputational, and intellectual risks are necessary sacrifices that move the cradle of humanity from infancy’s Geocentric model to the adolescent Heliocentric model — and further to more mature universal models. But they remain social, mathematical and cosmological models.
Thinking outside the model is what upsets those too attached to looking at life from arbitrary metrics, that we created as sense making tools. Our ingenious measuring systems help us communicate and agree on autoCAD files for mass manufacturing but those same measuring systems blind us from what’s beyond measurement — where our units don’t apply and our physics breaks down. So who sees the truer reality — the one observing the microcosm through a microscope or the one observing the macrocosm through a telescope — or the one liberated from the narrow looking glass of both?
Society doesn’t honor those seekers who venture outside the model alone and who in their returning bring back value to the collective. The revolutionary Teslas, Jungs, Shakurs, Lennons, and Mandelbrots, get crucified by the unaware masses. They are then celebrated after their deaths, when their once neglected ideas translate to value for the blind. In their weakness, the majority can at best participate from a distance in a hashtag or post praise of felled artists, doctors, scientists and thinkers — when they feel it is socially accepted and psychologically safe from the armchair of groupthink. The most sensible thing to do is to keep one foot in the manmade world and one foot in the natural beyond, to not lose balance and get swayed by optical delusions of consciousness. Can you step out the model?
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