Inspirational Thinking Threatens Authoritarian Personalities

Most people think that all humans are pretty much alike. They always have been and they always will be. Some even believe that humans are a one-off, made in the image of God. Imagine that...a God that creates a system whereby you swallow and breath through the same narrow tube. Brilliant! One wonders why it took him so long to create Heimlich?

In fact, fossils of at least a half-dozen proto-humans have now been identified and a few of those were close enough to us that (give or take a few tattoos) they might well pass as an opening act for the Backstreet Boys. So what, you may wonder, kept them from figuring out microphones and amplifiers and starting their own group? In a word - Inspiration.

And yet, how can that be the whole story? Neanderthals were on Earth for twice as long as we've been here and yet the tools they made near the end of their time were almost identical to their very first efforts. They stopped at their "here and now" without ever being inspired to think about their "there and then." Modern man, Homo sapiens, left the rest in the dust only by going beyond immediate reality and creating what might be.

We make some of our greatest gains when we see old things in new ways. Newton wasn't the first to see an apple fall from a tree and what did Einstein do if not look at the universe from a completely different perspective? My friend Kort Patterson does this all the time and his most recent column (in a super high IQ Intertel publication) deals with the topic of all those proto-humans and what it was that set us apart.

While imagination is pretty much a given in man-like brains, inspiration is far less common. What's more, when it does occur it can be derived from entirely erroneously sources and interfered with at every level. Here are some examples courtesy of Kort:

The Italian Renaissance, the foundation of our modern world, came about when the artistic and architectural achievements of the ancients were rediscovered. And yet, that discovery was mostly made-up. The Greeks and Romans would not have recognized what was presented in their name. They would have considered the surviving ruins - the straight lines and bare marble - as being both unfinished and decidedly ugly.

And even what did remain intact was subject to censorship. Much of the unfettered sensuousness of Pompeii was plastered over by the sexually inhibited Victorians. Their repressive social order and applied perversity demanded a masochistic rejection of physical pleasure and a pious denial of human nature. The church tried doing much the same with scientific and technological advances but the inspiration of the few eventually created the prosperity now enjoyed by the many. Looked at in this way, much of human history is an account of anarchic creativity opposed by authoritarian attempts to control it.

Kort ends with: Paradoxically, it has been creativity that has created ever more effective means for authoritarians to impose their authority. The question we face today is whether we're willing to learn from the mistakes of the past or whether we'll allow the primitive residue of authoritarianism to restrict and repress the imagination and creativity that defines us in the modern world?

Visit Kort Patterson's archive of articles at:

http://www.kortexplores.com/node_browser/nodes_by_category/vocabulary/1