Monday, March 9, 2015

Mimicry

On days with nice weather, a young neighbor girl hangs out near the front of my house, in her Mom's driveway, where the wifi reception is, apparently, excellent. She has a tablet and appears to be primarily concerned with dancing and singing whatever fashionable song there is these days, which reminds me that mimicry is part of learning.

A lot of folks don't really escape mimicry, and that's not particularly a bad thing, assuming you are mimicking sound life skills. I like to think I am beyond mimicry in a few places- cooking for sure. I'll get five recipes, read them, and suss out what I think is the essence of whatever it is I want to make, but nice girl with forty-seven recipes handed down from Mom or Grandma can do the job pretty well. Sadly, I don't see many of those kinds of girls.

America doesn't remember it's past very well, otherwise it would realize, regardless of denominations, we always had para-church type inclinations- always having that profound emotional swing in the revival tent, only to have it fade soon after, in time to have a go at all the other human passions. There's a missing bit that the biblical dialectic has not got- there's nothing to mimic; there are only pronouncements to agree or disagree with. Liturgy provides what words do not.

Few are systems thinkers. I have spent quite a long while giving people the benefit of the doubt, and then they insist on removing that doubt, as if they were being deliberate about it, that they would not have me spending one more minute thinking that their IQs were an iota over one hundred, unless every jot above 100 were dedicated to keep the wheel of self delusion running, so that they could continue to dance their dance in good weather, get their umpteenth hit of dopamine off of some pointless social situation, and ignore the ever accreting nonsense.

They teach leadership now. As if it is a subject matter that anyone can master. As if this clear difference between a systems thinker and a non-systems thinker meant nothing. Given that this is a situation that has been underway for sometime, the average earnest person casting about, trying to figure out how to be a good leader, has nothing but poor examples to mimic. He has not seen a good leader, and in most cases he has been told precisely the wrong things, and he doesn't know what a real leader looks like.

So, we, as a society are getting progressively worse. The daft are in charge. Those who seek to be good leader pursue daftness as if it is skill, right along with charisma, and obsequiously trying to remember everyone's names.

I realized last night I could do lectures on building a city. I have the knowledge. I know how to start it- not plan it out, but how to grow it- like a seed. I know the plan is coming into fruition long before it ever becomes a city, if Montessori's idea of the teen years being spent doing farm related work becomes a reality- not by force, but in a sort of unschooling way. I know how to help people heal- how to have this integrated into the mission, so that the growth of the population comes from healed people, so that we don't just end up with another sick culture under a different name.

I know how to make thing relatively safe for the mimics, so that they have robust health, and can contribute to the strength, the anti-fragility of the society.

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