Hey,
Welcome to Frame, a series of posts on the human condition and our changing relationship with the world around us. We’ll talk through conditions that were once beautiful curiosities, now desensitized into the mundane — something I like to call adolescent romances. If you’re with it, you can sign up here.
Something I've been noticing more among my peers is this emphasis on originality. "Nothing is original, good artists copy, and great artists steal" we say, with a glint in our eyes, as we revel in our own creativity yet unwilling to truly accept it inside. We want to believe a part of us is original as if we aren't a sum of unexplainable biological processes and experiences rendered into the subconscious.
We push for originality as if it’s supposed to make us happier and more fulfilled. Of originality, like that is the end goal of human existence. To leave a footprint onto the human consciousness - I WAS HERE - it reads, only to be blown away by the work of our peers and progeny.
Truth is not original, but personal. You make it for yourself. You discover your way, your creed, and spread it into the world. With time, with charm, it becomes the world. It starts off as the lenses in which you interpret the world's messages. The language you use to quantify and qualify. With time, with luck, it becomes the lenses in which others interpret the world's messages as well. And with that, you birth a form of shared intentionality, the forerunner to a functioning community.
These lenses are upheld by multiplicity - we can only explain truth through a consensus model. What holds majority sway is noted as fact and new members are forced to abide by it, subduing their own opinions for the right to be accepted into the community. Dissidents are kept under watch, deviate too much and you're expelled.
Now with the consensus model, the venerability of truth thus exists at the level of the profane rather than the sacred. That the fundamental nature of existence we abide by is only built by the minds of man, not the mind of God. That if we want change, we can change it at the social level rather than the spiritual - which is to say it is possible. The truth-bringers exist at the same level of the hierarchy as us. So why not us? The winners write history and define goodness - so what not you?
Please excuse the less than sensical elements of this piece. It’s late and I feel like I must get this out now else I never will. Momentum has worth. Better to shoot than ruminate unto infinity.