A Brand New Thing

A Brand New Thing

Act II – A Tragedy

[Audio recording of post available – above ‘The Daily Stone’ near bottom of page (9:41)]

The Brief-

• There aren’t many Brand New Things left
• “Reinventing the Wheel” is a primal experience that’s been stolen from us, with tragic consequences
• Money is the highest object of our consumer society. And the capitalist priority insists that “Time is Money”
  • Thus “efficiency” (the fastest solution) is the greatest good
• I’ll try to show how humanity is sacrificed on the altar of “efficiency”

A Brand New Thing is Pretty Much Statistically Impossible

I didn’t invent the Preachy Variety Act. As long as there have been church talent shows, there have been preachy variety acts.

We have fifty thousand years of history as anatomically modern humans. In that time we have discovered, pioneered, mastered, and forgotten an immeasurable amount of culture and technology. Even if we think we have created something new, we can rest assured we have not. We are not capable of imagining how many humans have had a chance to stumble across that same discovery, or another the same in principal, long before we were ever born. Even the greatest modern contributions to human life always have a prior iteration somewhere, at some point in time.¹ And no, Steve Jobs did not “invent” the “disruptive technological breakthrough” that has “revolutionized human life!” Sigh.

But prior to the advent of the internet² you could at least imagine you were the first person to discover or create something new. Now, no matter how clever you think you are, you will find that you’re always too late. You can’t even coin a new phrase. For instance, in describing Diogenes, Jesus, and others figures who rejected a culture fixated on worldly material “possession,” I’ve used the expression Unbearable Beings of Lightness.³ For a moment I even imagined I was the first person on the internet to express that inversion!

Nope. Not even close.⁴

When it comes to the set of genuinely Brand New Things that a normal human is capable of manifesting into the world, our race suffers from severe resource depletion. But until now that has never presented an existential problem for creators.

Reinventing the Wheel

As a kid I once read an interview with Eric Clapton. He described how he received a guitar as a gift at a young age, but without even the most basic instruction on how to use the thing. He fooled around with it in total ignorance for long enough that he discovered the E chord and the A chord. As a young musician I was astonished and envious of this – Eric Clapton’s journey of discovery began so young and from such a primitive level that he got to personally experience the invention of the chord?!

My friend Andy Linn⁵ has a photo essay on his site that documents his clever solution to a problem with a sailboat he built. His deceptively sophisticated idea and his utilitarian application were quite effective. This experience of manifesting his creative inspiration into the world provided obvious joy.

He learned later, of course, that this exact solution was an age-old and established practice. As he states –

I know I am not the first person to come up with the ‘sliding gunter‘ mast rig. I mean, people have been sailing for 8,000 years. Every idea has been tried 50 times already. Still, I had never seen one, nor did someone tell me about it – so yeah, I reinvented the wheel. Big deal, I am claiming this reinvention as my own.

Andrew Linn – The Little Fat Sailboat April 22, 2005 – www.andrewlinn.com

A Brand New Thing

I believe that “reinventing the wheel” is a primal human experience. Actually I’m fairly certain it forms virtually all of our individual human creative expressions. I am convinced that as we manifest our – thoroughly-redundant – personal inspiration into the world we validate our existence and our constructive participation in reality. This fulfills a vital human need, the need for Self-Actualization.⁶

And should the product offer something valuable that another human being can appreciate, the experience is magnified and fulfills even deeper human needs – our needs for acceptance and belongingness, and for the esteem of others.

It is my opinion that this fulfillment is fundamental to human health. To deprive us of it is a life-denying, alienating violation of our basic needs. And it is a grievous transgression.⁷

Constructive participation in reality takes effort, practice, and most importantly – a patient tutor. And the end result is a product that is not optimized for its purpose, produced through an “inefficient” investment of time.

A Brand New Thing

The “Efficiency” Obsession

In the most deeply materialist consumer society to ever exist, the acquisition of money is our highest pursuit. And in a society dominated by the capitalist paradigm, time is money. If any two processes produce functionally identical products, the one that consumes the least time is “efficient.” The “efficient” method is embraced by default; the other is discarded. We will not teach young humans how to perform it. It is a waste of time (money).

And that is how we deprive young humans of the fulfillment of their primal needs. The disastrous consequences for society grow more apparent each day.⁸

A very young human could be, and once was, taught to manifest into the world a truly revolutionary triumph of human genius. By way of their minds, their hands, a couple of stones, and a properly selected leaf or strip of tree bark, a child can create string.

This is a terribly inefficient use of the time and effort of everyone involved. The end product will be grossly unsatisfactory to our modern expectations for mass-produced excellence. But it will be a transformative and spiritually-enriching experience. Through the application of their mind and body to basic, raw features of their physical environment, they will transform a living piece of their world into a universal tool, which they can then employ in greater constructive participation with the cosmos. The experience will unite them with their world in a spiritually fulfilling, sacred bond.

Again, this activity is emphatically not “efficient.” But the human experience is not an exercise in “efficiency!” “Efficiency” is the province of machines, and we don’t stand the slightest chance of competing with them in that realm.

The “Efficiency” Delusion

You’ve noticed that I’ve highlighted “efficiency” with scare quotes throughout this article. I wouldn’t cast doubts on an understanding so universally-assumed without a good explanation, but the path to get there from here is longer than even I would consider appropriate for this article. It will be covered later.

A Brand New Thing

Wrap It Up

Beyond the “efficiency” required to fulfill our fundamental human needs (and I believe we have the capacity to do so for all of us if we felt like it), I think increases in “efficiency” yield diminishing returns in life satisfaction.

Worse still, “efficiency” is the altar upon which Late-Stage Capitalism casually sacrifices our humanity.

And worst of all, it is in the heedless pursuit of “efficiency” that Artificial Intelligence has been unleashed upon the world to rob us of the last vestiges of humanity we have left.

I want to acknowledge the absurdity of a blog with footnotes (let alone eight of them). There is only one that’s important, so I will repeat the context and follow with the text of the footnote.

We will not teach young humans how to perform a task by a method that is more “inefficient” than another alternative. It is a waste of our time (money). And that is how we deprive young humans of the fulfillment of their primal needs. The disastrous consequences for society grow more apparent each day.

Footnote 8 – Constructively interacting with our world provides us with validation of our existence and agency. But it requires investment on the part of the student. And it requires even greater investment from a committed teacher.

Absent a knowledgeable and patient tutor, there is another, and far more accessible, means for the deprived human to validate their agency and existence.

DESTRUCTION

The Daily Stone

1. Some unknown ancient Hebrew offered the first recorded understanding that disease can spread via the contagion of others. Citizens of ancient Greece and Rome (and we know their names) provided the first recorded suspicion that germs formed the mechanism of disease transmission. And vaccination for life threatening disease was first pioneered in 10th Century China. ↩︎
2. Which I will allow was an Actual Brand New Thing produced by a person – thanks Al Gore! ↩︎
3. Itself of course just a twist on the title of Milan Kundera’s novel ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ ↩︎
4. I only thought so because I ran my first search with the term “unbearable beings of lightness” ↩︎
5. Andy Linn and his website are the reason that this site, in this form, exist. He is the inspiration for my concept of the Exceptional Everyman living a life of universally accessible adventure and individual creative self-expression in the ordinary world, and celebrating it fully. ↩︎
6. As I write this, my father is deeply frustrated with me. He is temporarily incapacitated and can’t perform chores that he believes are vitally important. And they are important. But if they aren’t completed the world will not end. Their house will not fall down, water will still flow from the spring, and we will all still have food to eat. We’ll be safe and we will still love and admire each other.
   
   But his human mind will irrationally yoke his innate vertebrate fear to his ambitious goals and it will make him anxious. And His need for self-actualization will not be fulfilled to the degree that he would like them to.
   
   I dearly love my father and believe the chores he feels desperate to complete are of great practical importance. But I am prioritizing my need for self-actualization – despite the the inevitable consequence of personal conflict. ↩︎
7. I will address this in a future article. My conception of morality disregards the notion of “Human Rights” entirely. It is structured around “Human Needs.” ↩︎
8. Constructively interacting with our world provides us with validation of our existence and agency. But it requires investment on the part of the student. And it requires even greater investment from a committed teacher.
   
   Absent a knowledgeable and patient tutor, there is another, and far more accessible, means for the deprived human to validate their agency and existence.
   
   Destruction ↩︎