Of course my founding post to this thread was "racist". It was a clear attempt to label a box and to shove all Americans in there. Not very smart, you suppose. Not if I myself were unconscious of the inherent racism of what I said. But I was fully conscious of it. Is that still racism? It's not that I am a racist, but I definitely felt there to be a point in saying something that might strike others as racist because this is a good way to put people on their toes. It was done for a purpose to do with creative thinking. That purpose is an operation known as "provocation". I am provoking others to respond, in order to see the thinking. In fact I am not racist at all because I admire Americans greatly. How could one not. But I wrote something racist in order to see whether some others might see that they were being provoked. Provocation is sometimes necessary in order that people see things they feel they know very well in a new light. Creative thinking is taking existing information and extracting new value from it.
For example, had I said the following: "America is the land of the free. America champions the cause of freedom the world over and will fight fiercely to maintain a free world. Americans are all natural-born entrepreneurs and understand business in an intuitive way better than anyone else on the planet. Anyone can succeed with a new idea in America because Americans love a new idea and will get behind it and help it to come to fruition, particularly if that idea helps support the cause of freedom and successful entrepreneurial business enterprises." - would I still be guilty of racism? The mental operation is identical; I have a box and I am shoving an entire country into it. The point should be clear: what motivates all thinking are the values espoused by the thinker, and those values are based on their 1p experiences. That's what perception is. Perception is "first order thinking" which is to say more a statement about ourselves, not at all the thing we would like others to believe we are talking about. The very first thing we experience in any exchange or encounter with the "outside world" is not the outside world at all, but ourselves. We meet ourselves in everything we say and do. To continue with perception for a moment: I said above that Americans love freedom, America is the land of the free etc. All this is true. But it is true in only a limited sense. It is true in the sense that choices are able to be made without coercion or force being applied. For example, an man sits at a table in a restaraunt in France and is presented with a choice of beverages. There is wine, there is cognac, there is cider, there is champagne and there is Budweiser beer. The man freely chooses the beer. A free choice is made. But the choice is made not out of curiosity but out of familiarity. Is that still freedom of choice? If you are ignorant of the qualities of the various alternatives to your preferred choice, in what sense are you making a free choice? More likely you are shackled to your preference. When we do creative thinking, we learn to take familiar situations and traverse a different path in thinking about them. This requires training and is not at all a natural habit of mind. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
