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From: Kim Jones <[email protected]>
>>Of course my founding post to this thread was "racist".
Yes... we agree, it was.
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."
If you had said that I would think that you were informing your world view
exclusively from the diet of flag wrapped drivel served up by the Fox News corp
>>- 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.
You would be guilty of reducing the complex tapestry of reality into the
"false" order of prejudicial stereotyped mental superstructures that replace
critical thinking with un-examined notions and pre-supplied "answers".
>>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.
Perception is the stream our senses impinge upon the inner reality of our
massively parallel wetware. What we make of this stream of perception depends
on whether we actually analyze it -- i.e. spend the time to think about it and
ponder the complexity inherent in it... or whether on the other hand we supply
a pre-made "answer" that boxes the stream into a pre-labeled phenomena... and
in so doing reducing the true experience to a reified symbolic ready made stand
in for the real thing.
While this is a useful trick -- and definitely has evolutionary advantages
(don't waste a second pondering about the meaning of that moving grass -- act
like it IS a saber tooth tiger... immediately) -- it also leads down the very
blind alley of prejudicial mental constructs replacing actual thinking.
>>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.
Says who? Not I for sure.... I live here and know better.
>>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.
Who, among us is truly free? We are all of us creatures of habit on many
levels... and that is fine as long as we also recognize this. Prejudicial
mental processes short-circuit the actual working out of a situation; replacing
true mental activity with ready made pre-determined answers. I see this kind of
mental laziness as being at the root of most of our worlds problems and as the
prime driver of our stupidity.
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.
I disagree... creativity requires no special training we are all born with it;
it is the most natural state of mind... Creativity is a natural part of the
mind -- every little baby is born with it to one degree or another...
creativity is instead carefully squashed by the cultural induction process as
the creative individual is beaten down and molded into becoming a member of a
given culture -- whatever that culture may be.
Chris
Kim
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