When I was a child, my first loves were music, literature, sport, nature, and toys. Later my tastes developed into poetry, philosophy, physics, mathematics etc. Someone whom I know who had spent his life being very successful called me a polymath. After googling the word and seeing that it put me in the same category as the likes of Goethe and Plato, I very happily took on this title. Later, I began to question it. Am I someone so extraordinary that mind my is so restless and brilliant that it seeks out all of these disparate things? Or is it so much simpler than that? I began to analyse what I liked and saw that there was a thread that ran through them all. The thread which binds them all is narrative. Music tells a story and takes you on a journey. Nature only makes sense in the context of it being lived in linear time. Psychology is the story of how we became who we are. Mathematics is the story of how we try to understand the universe and so on and so forth. All of the things that interest me fit within a narrative structure and thusly, instead of being a polymath, I was just someone who liked stories.
My interest in stories shaped the world around me. I would seek people whom I found to be interesting within my broad definition of interesting (for example, authentic, not ‘normal’ etc.). More often than not, the books I would read would, in some part, remind me of me and help me to grow as a person, drawing upon the lives and wisdom of those who have come before. Great writers such as Erich Fromm I stopped reading as his thought was too much like mine, I didn’t think I could view his work objectively. Other writers whom I loved, be it literature, film, music etc., I lost my connection with as I outgrew them, or the lessons they could impart. My interest in poetry diminished or evolved (maybe both) as I gained more life experience and many of the threads of poetry that I loved, for example, philosophy and politics, grew into more definitive, specialist, subjects as opposed to vague allusions in the poetic form. However, through it all, I was still the child playing with his toys, creating (and documenting) complex worlds which made perfect sense to me, exploring the narrative that is my life.
Just as my inner life started to shape the reality around me, I began to notice that others were being shaped by their environment. Society, for it to function, has to aim for the lowest common denominator. Although it can be presented in different ways, fundamentally it is still the same. We hear about previous generations going to the theatre and we think them to be highly educated superior societies. When we look more closely, we find that probably the same amount of people as now went to the opera and ballets, and the reast would go to vaudeville-esque shows, the equivalent of popular TV dramas which people watch now. Thusly we could see that people had not become less highbrow, rather it had remained consistent.
Upon analysis of cultures, be they Rome’s Bread and Circuses, or minstrels, or whatever drama is currently on HBO, one can see the same basic thread running through them. The most fundamental part of a person is the survival instinct. This instinct manifests in three main ways: sustenance; procreation; and fear. With these in mind, go into a book shop, or turn on the TV, or listen to conversations as people pass and the majority of things you will find fit into three categories: relationships (procreation, sexual and societal); cooking and housing (sustenance); the latest, biggest, baddest news story about people or situations different to what the speaker considers ‘normal’ (fear). Thusly, these three categories, which thousands of years ago were the difference between life and death, become the dominant threads of the modern society.
Society was created, fundamentally, to serve the most primitive aspect of being alive, survival, and yet, thousands of years later, society shapes those new to it in the same way that it was shaped and so the shaped becomes the shaper and the cycle of primitive reactions continues to shape our world.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 