The Challenge Of Social Misfits Who Make Discoveries
'Bear bravely and proudly the smear of "madness" with which they try to gag all innovators' Manifesto of The Futurist Painters, 1910
If you are socially inept or disinterested, those people who do fit in adequately with society have a tendency, I've found, to want to put a label on you. In a high proportion of instances of this labelling, it conveys the message of a judgment that you have some sort of mental problem... for example: mentally ill / schizophrenic / autistic / bipolar / nut - nutter - nutjob / crackpot / crank / loon / wacko / weirdo / kook. It seems that anyone who is a social misfit cannot simply be accepted as such by those who populate conventional social realms of activity; but, rather, they must be characterised by the judgers with a defined slant that paints them as being wrong in mind or character, effectively - to the conformers - proven merely by their non-conformity.
According to the limited lifestyles and outlooks of the conformers to social ordinariness, it is, apparently, not possible for any individual outside of the common rule of human activity, to accomplish anything of much significance. According to their herd mentality, it is, apparently, necessary to conform to what other people around you are doing most of the time, in order to contribute anything of value to humanity.
Where did this negative, judging mentality (i.e. prejudice) come from ? How did it come about? To a large extent, the origin must be, I feel, in the family unit, where children have impressed upon them, by their parents, the sense that they will never amount to anything of great importance to anyone. The parents communicate to their children, who are made to be obedient and narrow in outlook, that almost all wisdom or insight comes from them (the parents) as well as from other pre-sanctioned social authority figures, including - scientists; politicians; religious leaders, and school teachers. Along with the family, another source of the widespread fear of independent discovery is school, where thousands of hours are spent reading pre-arranged knowledge in books, and having similarly pre-determined knowledge dictated to you orally by teachers. This is poor preparation for anyone to ever - as child, teenager, or adult - effectively meet the challenge of unfamiliar knowledge, strange knowledge that is not already part of the established system.
It isn't surprising that the majority of those who have (to paraphrase Killing Joke) been put through this knowledge and discovery mangle of school and home, will not want to seriously consider discoveries made by any person who has not been endorsed by establishment-sanctioned authority figures and the commercial media. The independent discoverer, under these prevailing conditions, might be assumed by the systematically-conditioned adult masses, to be the grown-up equivalent of a 'badly-behaved' pupil, either in school, or 'bunking off' from school. If it is deemed, as a matter of course, that a child or teenager is 'bad' or 'crazy' not to obey the pre-determined knowledge dictators, in school, then it will likely be second nature to most adults, outside school, who've previously been through this relentlessly indoctrinating system of education, to assume that the free-thinking, questioning discoverer must also be 'bad' or 'crazy'.
With the considerably mind-crushing assistance of the anti-life, anti-discovery education system, and - in many cases - thanks, also, to religion, most children will continue to grow up devoid of any meaningful sense of their vast potential to do great things and make important discoveries without the ever-present figures of authority inexorably channeling their minds into only the accepted, pre-determined knowledge and ways of operating.
Educating its children into the enigmas of life by treating them like the component parts of a mechanical apparatus, who have to "work" and "get results", the Human Race perpetuates the lack of emerging solutions for its worst problems, day after day, year after year, century after century. Independent, free-minded discoveries, and the solutions to problems that they might offer us are either never made and found, or else they are suppressed by powerful people who want to continue exploiting the ever-lingering, terrible human crises.
It is surely this tainted web, made up of child repression and suppression of human discovery - vastly impactful, yet rarely discussed - which is the true, enduring "madness" that ought to concern us all.
'Bear bravely and proudly the smear of "madness" with which they try to gag all innovators' Manifesto of The Futurist Painters, 1910
If you are socially inept or disinterested, those people who do fit in adequately with society have a tendency, I've found, to want to put a label on you. In a high proportion of instances of this labelling, it conveys the message of a judgment that you have some sort of mental problem... for example: mentally ill / schizophrenic / autistic / bipolar / nut - nutter - nutjob / crackpot / crank / loon / wacko / weirdo / kook. It seems that anyone who is a social misfit cannot simply be accepted as such by those who populate conventional social realms of activity; but, rather, they must be characterised by the judgers with a defined slant that paints them as being wrong in mind or character, effectively - to the conformers - proven merely by their non-conformity.
According to the limited lifestyles and outlooks of the conformers to social ordinariness, it is, apparently, not possible for any individual outside of the common rule of human activity, to accomplish anything of much significance. According to their herd mentality, it is, apparently, necessary to conform to what other people around you are doing most of the time, in order to contribute anything of value to humanity.
Where did this negative, judging mentality (i.e. prejudice) come from ? How did it come about? To a large extent, the origin must be, I feel, in the family unit, where children have impressed upon them, by their parents, the sense that they will never amount to anything of great importance to anyone. The parents communicate to their children, who are made to be obedient and narrow in outlook, that almost all wisdom or insight comes from them (the parents) as well as from other pre-sanctioned social authority figures, including - scientists; politicians; religious leaders, and school teachers. Along with the family, another source of the widespread fear of independent discovery is school, where thousands of hours are spent reading pre-arranged knowledge in books, and having similarly pre-determined knowledge dictated to you orally by teachers. This is poor preparation for anyone to ever - as child, teenager, or adult - effectively meet the challenge of unfamiliar knowledge, strange knowledge that is not already part of the established system.
It isn't surprising that the majority of those who have (to paraphrase Killing Joke) been put through this knowledge and discovery mangle of school and home, will not want to seriously consider discoveries made by any person who has not been endorsed by establishment-sanctioned authority figures and the commercial media. The independent discoverer, under these prevailing conditions, might be assumed by the systematically-conditioned adult masses, to be the grown-up equivalent of a 'badly-behaved' pupil, either in school, or 'bunking off' from school. If it is deemed, as a matter of course, that a child or teenager is 'bad' or 'crazy' not to obey the pre-determined knowledge dictators, in school, then it will likely be second nature to most adults, outside school, who've previously been through this relentlessly indoctrinating system of education, to assume that the free-thinking, questioning discoverer must also be 'bad' or 'crazy'.
With the considerably mind-crushing assistance of the anti-life, anti-discovery education system, and - in many cases - thanks, also, to religion, most children will continue to grow up devoid of any meaningful sense of their vast potential to do great things and make important discoveries without the ever-present figures of authority inexorably channeling their minds into only the accepted, pre-determined knowledge and ways of operating.
Educating its children into the enigmas of life by treating them like the component parts of a mechanical apparatus, who have to "work" and "get results", the Human Race perpetuates the lack of emerging solutions for its worst problems, day after day, year after year, century after century. Independent, free-minded discoveries, and the solutions to problems that they might offer us are either never made and found, or else they are suppressed by powerful people who want to continue exploiting the ever-lingering, terrible human crises.
It is surely this tainted web, made up of child repression and suppression of human discovery - vastly impactful, yet rarely discussed - which is the true, enduring "madness" that ought to concern us all.
posted by Daniel Transit at 2:58 PM
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