Blunt force trauma
Ow! So I bumped my head against a low-lying support beam inside the Admissions Office closet. I don't understand how I could be consciously thinking about how to avoid hitting my head one moment, and then going ahead and hitting it anyway the next. The conscious mind must seriously be ill suited for multitasking. Thank goodness I don't have to think about breathing, walking, eating, or talking; otherwise, I would never get out of bed in the morning.
It seems to me, then, that the best course of action for humans would be to devolve and rid ourselves of the conscious mind. What good has it done us anyway? It is the source of our moral conundrums, the architect of our hideously unsustainable way of life, and the intellectual dealer who invariably leads us astray. Think of it this way... This is how things are... This is how the world works... Believe this, believe that... Simplicity... Truth... At best, all conscious thoughts are only first order approximations of reality.
Our unconscious minds are actually better suited for dealing with higher orders of complexity. This is the subject of the book Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. One of my questions after reading it, though, was: Can we setup our society to train and use our unconscious minds to manage its organization? Think about it. Right now, our society [the USA] is setup, quite frankly, to run as a piss-poor manufacturing process. Immigrants and students are the raw materials, and schools and socio-economic classes are the machines to process and sort our citizens into either fuel or cogs for the machinery of our economy.
What if instead we had a better way of helping people find their true calling(s) in life so that people are mostly doing what they like and are good at? Wouldn't that be more efficient for society overall then having people do mediocre work in jobs that they dislike or are indifferent to just so that they can make money to survive? That alternative, that idea is called the Generative Society.
Maybe it's the blunt force trauma speaking, but I think this is where we need to go, and I hope my unconscious mind agrees.
It seems to me, then, that the best course of action for humans would be to devolve and rid ourselves of the conscious mind. What good has it done us anyway? It is the source of our moral conundrums, the architect of our hideously unsustainable way of life, and the intellectual dealer who invariably leads us astray. Think of it this way... This is how things are... This is how the world works... Believe this, believe that... Simplicity... Truth... At best, all conscious thoughts are only first order approximations of reality.
Our unconscious minds are actually better suited for dealing with higher orders of complexity. This is the subject of the book Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. One of my questions after reading it, though, was: Can we setup our society to train and use our unconscious minds to manage its organization? Think about it. Right now, our society [the USA] is setup, quite frankly, to run as a piss-poor manufacturing process. Immigrants and students are the raw materials, and schools and socio-economic classes are the machines to process and sort our citizens into either fuel or cogs for the machinery of our economy.
What if instead we had a better way of helping people find their true calling(s) in life so that people are mostly doing what they like and are good at? Wouldn't that be more efficient for society overall then having people do mediocre work in jobs that they dislike or are indifferent to just so that they can make money to survive? That alternative, that idea is called the Generative Society.
Maybe it's the blunt force trauma speaking, but I think this is where we need to go, and I hope my unconscious mind agrees.
posted by Andrew at 5:08 PM
0 comments
