John Wise

Cross-generational mistrust, mistrust between the sexes, hate between political parties, disdain for the other team, anger at people of different nationalities, and biases against skin color are some of the divisions between Americans that are exploited at every opportunity. So, what unites us?

We have been torn asunder from within with the flimsiest of ideas that a shared land called the United States is enough to assure a citizenry that we have something in common. While we may use the same currency and pay taxes to a federal centrally located government, we are hardly Americans as much as we are millions of tiny factions. This wasn’t a ploy from individuals to break out of a dominant oppressive regime, but a fracturing by the powerful, media, and ourselves as we whipped things into a frenzy of polarization.

We no longer have a shared dream, vision, or hope for a better future. Nothing in the world of ideas unifies us anymore. We have lost our rudder. Some will say things like national emergencies can unite a people, yet the events of 9/11 only lasted a brief moment. Here, we are in a racial, climate, educational, and cultural emergency, and we are paralyzed.

At the base of this paralysis is a deep division that is amplified to further separate “us” and “them,” except there are millions of these tiny camps of “us” and “them.”

Yet, we all want the same things: good friends, a healthy family, financial security, job opportunities, viable education, and a safe place to live. So what are we doing to that end? Nothing.

Not only did we extend the infantilism of children well into their early teen years, but we also extended high school far into adulthood. The cliques of our campus years are alive and well as apparently, we saw no need to mature past that. It doesn’t matter if your group is a bunch of white supremacists, football fans, followers of a particular car type, bikers, financiers, hipsters, or some other brand identity. If you belong to a subgroup of loyal followers, you have likely adopted attitudes, fashion, and positions that are accepted by the inner circle of thought leaders who require these signs of your belonging. Being an individual is not an option; conform or go elsewhere.

It is a perverted idea that these acts of conformity and polarized groupings are part of the American DNA that makes us unique and special. We are witnessing the travesty that is destroying the fabric of what we were. Rugged individuals can find strength in their struggle to define their character, but to join the herd is the easy relegation of being responsible enough to risk isolation for defining oneself.

It’s seeping through our minds and there will be no stopping it because it’s smaller than the size of an electron, it’s as ephemeral as a photon, as elusive as the neutrino, and as ubiquitous. What is this energy that permeates our ether that can appear to travel everywhere? It is the digital age of information dispersion and with it arrives a modern-day renaissance of mind and art manifesting a convulsion, creating a gulf among generations that appear to be on opposing trajectories. Grabbing hold and harnessing this driving momentum requires a new science, one whose tools are finessed by the sensor, algorithm, and gesture. One and all, we must become technicians versed in the manipulation and interpretation of signal and frequency.

A transposition of mind is required but is being fought by an aging population afraid of the loss of control and influence. They have become anachronistic within our lifetimes and cling to their archaic methods and analog ways. There is little solace to be offered as they fail to reignite their former glow that is looking like the fading light of the aurora as dawn brushes the night aside.

The rise of digital complexity started its ascent decades ago, but its true nature as an infiltrator and evolutionary overlord is just now being reckoned with. Little did we understand as a species that the combined efforts of Gottfried Leibniz, Joseph Jacquard, Charles Babbage, William Shockley, and Jack Kilby across the centuries were going to unsettle every aspect of life as we know it.

Influenced by the I Ching, Leibniz refined our present-day binary number system in the 17th century, while Joseph Jacquard, in the following century, gave us a programmable loom controlled by punched cards that would inspire Charles Babbage to lay the foundation of the computer. William Shockley and his creation of the transistor were followed by Jack Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit; both would be the cornerstones of our present digital age and personal computing devices.

Of course, things like electronic communication, starting with the telegraph leading to the telephone and internet along with the television and then the technology of CCDs, operating systems, wireless technology, and smartphones, have all played pivotal roles, too.

These events were, in some ways, isolated bits of history that appeared mostly as incremental advances pushing forward the ability and convenience we humans would benefit from. As the 21^st century arrived, there was a speed of change that eclipsed the popular zeitgeist and the ability to recognize its broader impact. A relatively small pocket of our intellectual world was evolving at the speeds our fiber optics and fastest CPUs were able to churn through in order to deliver a new viral form of communication, where cat videos were being exchanged instantly, globally. We, on the other hand, were distracted by this saturation of information for idiots, which was, in effect, blinding us from our personal responsibilities.

In the crush of this technological revolution, the distraction brought on by the spectacle of a previously unimagined universe took us from goat.se and Two Girls One Cup to beheadings and witnessing mass destruction in earthquakes and tsunamis while we were gulping down reality television and sharing nonsense that was not affording us a clear view of what our own roles would be when the digital dust settled. Out of this trash and noise rose the building blocks that, when sprinkled with the water of imagination, will give form to a new paradigm of communication that will transcend all of our previous efforts.

The reason for this supposition is that in our histories, we have acted primarily on the local level even when local was country-, state-, or nationwide. Our current condition is global, if not universal, in that we are able to consume, communicate, and exchange nearly all things relatively instantaneously around our Earth. Modern transportation and communication allow us to know this larger world; the immediacy that is currently happening is like a hyper-accelerated version of history that turned ancient forests into coal and sea creatures into oil. Their carbon changed over millennia into a usable energetic material, allowing our modernity to take the shape of convenience. And like those hydrocarbons that would propel us down the road of innovation, we humans of this age are now responsible for converting our decaying information into a new type of knowledge that will propel us into the future, where wisdom will drive our evolution.

Here is our disconnect. While we’ve been entertaining ourselves to death, the force of nature has been busy creating the conditions that will task us with the herculean chore of rearranging the molecular structure that is embodied in the fabric of our existence and that of being knowledge-driven entities. How, then, do we go about placing the 21st-century equivalent of the shovel into the clutch of humans who need to get to work building our future?

Love is amplified and brought into clarity the closer one gets to understanding what will remain unknown and unshared. Each new song is a reminder that the next may go unheard. Rolling hills bathed in verdure punctuated with wildflowers sing at us that this is love when able to be shared.

Love not known is silence, even in the howling face of noise. Loneliness has forgotten the song and has stolen the memories that are the only thing truly amassed in this lifetime. Sadness is the absence of celebration and is experienced as neglect from a love that was never shared. Better to wrap oneself in the fabric of potential that these are not lost or no longer achievable experiences but are there in our dreams and the soundtracks of our lives. We must actively find and/or cultivate love at every moment of our waking and sleeping existence.

Love is the tender hand of care, of reaching out to affirm our existence. It takes the form of feeding each other whatsoever is required to nourish the other. Love is reaffirmed in the fragility of mistakes because we are not perfect, and our flaws remind us how much we need unconditional love. Being human is to flirt with the multitude of our feelings, but to be a human in love, we must become intimate with the most fragile of emotions. What is it that mingles in sound and music that brings us to weeping, tickles us at the image of beauty where light conveys a sensuality, allowing us to see the most beautiful sunset ever? How does the nature of sweeping a passion into our hearts bring all of our senses to the edge of recognizing our mortality?

The cascade of love pours forth into an abyss of time where it will never fill the void created by such an immense space. The flow of passion can only be felt in those rare showers when but a drop may splash upon you at first but in a blink, one is drenched in a knowing of ecstatic love few may ever have the fortune to know firsthand. Wrapped in the cold shell of being present should not be the clothes of our daily existence; we must don the exquisite wardrobe of love where our hearts are in concert, dancing to the song that intertwines our being.

Insipidness abounds since mediocrity became the new meritocracy, while banality can offer good standing in your local hate group. So, from the top of the system to the bottom, we have goals to achieve a level of the horrible person that should make normal people cringe.

Why are we cultivating these trends? I’d posit it is likely due to our abhorrence of the exceptional and of those who challenge us to understand them.

I always wanted to fit in, to be accepted, but I felt like I was on the outside. Now that I know I’m on the outside and no longer care to fit in, I want others to rise up from the muck of their putrid minds, shake off the stink of intellectual stagnation, and reinvigorate their humanity by embracing those things that have propelled our species such as education and culture.

I’m afraid we are course-correcting our trajectory that for years had leaped forward with a speed that may be proved to have been too fast for the majority of our species. After one hundred years of incredible technological advancements, it appears that the powers that be are curbing our path forward. Instead of paving the way with policies that allow and encourage easy participation and personal development, we are harming the structures and institutions that have been responsible for giving opportunities to those who can and are willing to embrace them.

My opportunity to advance my own education was wrecked by a system that forbids my over-ambitious curiosity and insisted I conform to my peers both socially and intellectually. If I wasn’t fitting in, I was in trouble. I was cast aside while those who preened themselves in blind subservience were elevated to seize the opportunity to attend the best post-secondary schools.

Today, we still force our children through the meat grinder that makes them all look and act like formless bags of gray meat. We must start tackling individualized education for our children and adults alike. Education will never work under its current guise as it’s pandering to the worst of our perverted sense of normal while trying to breed stupid consumers out of its wake. Our momentum won’t allow for a full reset, and our current mindset is afraid of even hints of change.

Did the experiment of enlightenment fail, or are we failing nature? Look around, and you will see just how miserably we are failing nature.

Cultural awareness and integration will continue to evolve as important essential keys to finding success in the global realm of ideas. Isolationism and nationalism will increasingly be seen as impediments to joining the stage of economic growth that relies on goods and ideas crossing borders. In the market of commodities where wood, steel, and coal are traded, there are simply raw materials that do not convey any information about those who harvested or created them.

Today raw materials are more frequently coming to be defined as software, energy, financial transactions, art, music, ethnic foods, and clothes from all corners of our earth. This type of trade is happening more and more by individuals who are imprinting important cultural information on their products. Through global communication and custom small-scale manufacturing, the localized contribution of the creators will continue to color the final product and influence its viability in the market of ideas. Ethical human behavior, as demonstrated by one’s social footprint, becomes part of a product’s DNA, and the way we do business evolves.

In consideration of this awareness, in designing my virtual world called Hypatia, it had been my goal to try to bridge these needs and offer a platform where young people could start to cultivate the acquisition of skill sets that would better allow them to compete in the global workforce. In this virtual world, creativity is the currency and sharing of the product.

We tried to facilitate this by creating a virtual international commercial area that encourages collaboration and learning through doing and exploration, which is nothing more than what helped usher in modernity, such as back on the Silk Road when traders would become aware of others’ cultures and practices. Through this exchange and over time, humanity moved into the Renaissance, where we saw an explosion of creativity in the arts and the beginning of modern science.

Our ambition was nothing less than the creation of a new Silk Road and Renaissance where art and science would enter a new dimension driven by the possibility that we are about to explore the infinite. Our age requires a boldness hitherto unseen in education to expand the scope of learning beyond borders, but this will require visionaries who will take risks with us to help shape what this future might look like.

One thing is certain: regardless of who leads this charge, the idea of the necessity of change is now in the wild and will, like all human thought, spread through our societies to those prepared to venture into the unknown, becoming the leaders and trailblazers who will chart a course for our future.

You can find this labor of love called Hypatia at TimefireVR and download it for FREE from Steam, Vive, or Oculus.