i think we sometimes use terms to ensure they can be boxed away safely.
criminal means him (mainly), not me.
axe murderer … whoa!
serial womaniser — never even occurred to me.
mentally ill. well. just crazed.
like a paving we never will tread; never will see ourselves treading … not being, you see, of that cloth.
i have a beef (you may have noticed) with western democratic and corporate notions of #teamwork.
i have a similar distaste of command and control economies. and, equally, i dislike exhortations to five-year plans and one-best-way only.
all these things were what we fought the #sovietunion during the #coldwar to resist.
and then, after we considered we won that war, thirty or forty years on it turns out the #ussr had won all the basics. big corps deliver command and control like nobody’s business, ever. #teamwork which subsumes the capabilities of original, #nonconformism to the interests of the collective … well, wouldn’t you know? and five-year plans — how common aren’t these in modern ways of thinking and doing … whether corporate companies or corporate-style public sectors?
let’s face it: the individualism of the human species has been lost to the need to do something over and over again, exactly.
one thing i notice in #stockholm right now: so many houses are simply anything but uniform. and they keep all the big trees wherever they don’t have a house’s foundations. they actually build around trees instead of razing it all to the ground before starting. and then, only then, balefully planting little trees which take decades to grow.
i could give you a ton of analogous examples, too: examples of where the #swedish have forged their own thoughts and praxis on a collectivism based beautifully around the individual. the individual person and the flora …
it’s not perfect: but it strives to do better.
nowhere else have i seen this instinct manifested so clearly. nowhere. nowhere with such a gorgeous attention to details.
we have a problem in our western democratic corporately-organised institutions and groupings: we universally fear a standout talent. we box it up in a label which protects not the labelled but ourselves. in fact, we prefer to see it as standout rather than something we could all deliver on one day.
even the box we call #genius is there to defend us from what we fear: that we also might shine today as never before during too many years.
better not to hope ever, than to break the habits of a deadening lifetime.
no?
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