John Wise

In the recombinant light, where parallel universes meet on the fringe of awareness, there are traces of quantum phenomena that, when observed by travelers fortunate enough to have discovered these rarefied domains, have been known to impart an elusive illumination of mind where awareness of its recesses are mapped and become available.

It’s not that our instincts and subconscious do not tap these areas of the ephemeral brain; it’s more about the fact that the majority of humanity over the course of our history has not had the opportunity of peering so deeply into areas responsible for creating our perception of reality. How light and its varied spectra are interpreted has a direct correlation to not only our language and hearing facility but also our knowledge of depth and distance across reality and time.

When tuned to seeing across time, the minds of humans are able to project themselves well into the future. While we have always had rudimentary abilities in this respect (hence why we created languages that allowed us to tell of our intentions in the future and recall what we’ve done in the past), our myopic version of this sense has been limited to our local environments and immediate community.

The idea that the tools for penetrating the mask of consciousness were discouraged and even forbidden due to a controller culture that feasted on greed while not understanding the potential to be discovered where the creativity of knowledge could deliver abundance was, for a large part of history a failure of our ancestors that continues through today with many of our contemporaries.

As matter and its recipe for building things at the molecular level were unfolding a primitive fear of exploring the unknown was still ruling the day. Little did people recognize that they were peering into the universe of creation and that they were looking into a mirror of their own potential.

Finally, as years of intellectual servitude give way to a need to explore any and all solutions to the paralyzing cultural and environmental malaise that has embraced the people of our planet, a cadre of guides must take up our electronic tools and build a type of digital psychedelic interface. Those curious enough and ready to peer within should then start to glean hints of enlightenment. With masses of people recognizing that our eyes and minds have been closed to who and what we are, a radical paradigm shift of work, economy, exploration, politics, and community can begin to emerge.

The role of the artist is not the same as that of the creator or inventor. The artist is allowed to create ambiguity that forces the viewer or listener to interpret through their own filter what meaning they might want to bring to experiencing a work. On the other hand, the creator or inventor must provide a means of finding the utility and function of the object or service so the end-user can best understand its value and what they must invest in to justify their expenditure of time.

Art, whether visual or audible, is like food in that it can nourish you, and it is up to the individual to savor it, decide to forego it, or figure out if it’s a regular part of their diet. You may have to learn the rules of operating a vehicle or utilizing public transportation to move across the earth’s surface in order to reach a destination in a specific time requirement. Art is a luxury that can take you places without the means of motion, rules, or the need to perform something within its context for survival, while transportation is a modern-day necessity.

Art has a personal interpretation that goes far beyond groupthink. When we attempt to force meaning out of art on others we are ignoring the ambiguity that varies between individuals. So, we fail to make sense of an aesthetic that will be experienced by the viewer and not the crowd. When the Beatles sang about love, the majority believed that the music and lyrical content were written from their personal experience and that interpretation did not conflict with the audience, yet when we look to a sub-genre of music out of an alternative culture whose lyrical expression conflicts with the dominant group, self-appointed representatives of interpretation form a kind of “authoritarian” regime and insist that they understand the true intent of this art and that others should heed their warning.

The same has been done with all visual and audible arts across a time when the contemporary audience wasn’t ready for the intellectual need to buttress their cultural walls against the attack. The fact is that the cat is out of the bag, and the extent artists have gone to reflect who we are has crossed the threshold of all semblance of good and bad taste.

So here we are in a time of widespread ability to distribute art, and the struggle to attract an audience is now harder than ever. Not too long ago, we had many a gatekeeper who were the arbiters of what would enter into the commercial space and who would be deemed worthy enough to earn a living from their craft. While there is no shortage of arenas to post, plaster, bombard, host, and otherwise give a platform to our art, the audience has global access to the works of millions of artists. This does not diminish the need of those who are investing their imagination and often their indignation into a track, canvas, poem, book, video, or public display to keep up the struggle of being seen and heard.

We are constantly flirting with leaders who fly with oppressive ideologies and are spreading fright using an uncertain future in which we are threatened with constant war, economic insecurity, terrorism, disease, migrants, and hostile religions. The imperative for humanity to turn to the arts to soothe our blistered senses is paramount. Only the artist can force us to confront our greater stupidities and lay them out bare to see ourselves for who we are and who we are yet to become.

Uncertainty and ambiguity are harming our well-being at a time when they should become relics of our past. Over the course of my years growing up in Los Angeles, living in Frankfurt, Germany, having spent 20-plus years in Phoenix, Arizona, and a great amount of time traveling the breadth of the United States, one thing I’ve come away with is that food, shelter, and the other essentials for life appear to be readily available to the majority of people in Western society. While health, weather, and the future are relative unknowns, things such as the basics are in good supply.

It’s my opinion that far too many are experiencing anxiety about their future as people are intentionally exposed to uncertainty and ambiguity. In the 1960s, we saw a nationwide reaction against the conformist mass culture that spread strong messages regarding rights for youth, women, African Americans, and freedom from war. During this time of upheaval, those who were creating the “turmoil” did not want to or could not even strive to be part of the controlling status-quo white male majority. Those in power were not directly impacted by or interested in drug experimentation, hippy culture, burning bras, or the plight of black Americans.

By the mid-1970s, the counter-culture rebels were becoming the middle-class suburbanites who let go of their rebellion and embraced the stability and conformity they had been protesting against in the previous decade. They brought with them an existential fear about the future, as the landscape of America had been dramatically altered by the upheaval they themselves helped seed. While their own children tried to carve out their own identities, these former rebellious parents started using fear in an attempt to arrest control of kids who were angry at the hypocrisy of a society that was trying to shove shifting cultural sands back into a box. Meanwhile, the parents kept their heads down and focused on the American dream. Kids continued cultivating ambiguity and their own rebellion as society turned to behavior-modifying drugs and myriad diagnoses, trying to corral the tsunami of change while festering insecurity about the future continued to grow.

We marched into the ’80s and ’90s with aging parents suffering from the vast gulf created by the rapid evolution of personal and industrial technologies. They were witnessing the playing field change dramatically to the point that the goalposts and rules were no longer recognizable. This created anxiety about where they were in life and how their final years would play out when they barely recognized the world around them, but this was exactly what they had helped to usher in. During this time, we started to see the waning of situations that might deny people prosperity and life’s basics.

While people grasp dated icons and worn paradigms in order to find order, they inherently know that this will not give them the sense of security that things are staying as they were, so they look for a leader who can promise to take things back to the way they were. History, though, ultimately denies this nostalgic dream of embracing an age that grew worn and useless to our continued advancement. While those who might attempt to lead a people down that rabbit hole will win many converts, this will only work to create deeper divides within society and those whose job it is to propel humanity forward. Populism is a cold, hard drug that always leads to despair, just like all abused drugs ultimately do.

The propellants of the future are the artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and critical thinkers whose toolkit does not include the option of standing still. So, while the divide between nostalgia and tomorrow is often drawn along ethnic or religious lines, those stupid enough to foment the horde into riot have misplaced animosities. If true revolution to stop change was undertaken, it would bring our species back into the stone age, as the target to retard or stop cultural and technological advancement would require the wholesale destruction of the aforementioned propellants and provocateurs who push into the unknown.

This idea of the unknown and, consequently, the ambiguity creates existential angst that even those who must wrestle with those demons find it difficult to slay their own fear and anxiety. Who are those I suggest “must” wrestle with these paradigms? They are again the artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and critical thinkers.

Our problems have been mounting since the end of the last century and accelerating following the millennium change. For nearly two decades here in the 21st century, the millennials have been thrust into roles in which the combined requirements of self-fulfillment, self-discovery, and the manifestation of an identity that is adaptable and nearly constantly challenged for being able to deal with a society that is amorphous and ambiguous have become a defining signature as they evolve their social and cultural identities.

Everything feels temporary; our job prospects, the amount of education that seemed adequate, our health care, and our economic viability, even our sexual identities feel like they are in a state of flux. Add to this mix that our racial makeup is and always has been evolving, and instead of confronting our own personal limitations and necessity to develop ourselves into the unknown in a process of discovery, it becomes easier to find a scapegoat in the form of the other. We give this “other” the weight of our own failings because to admit personal failure is to force us to be angry with our teachers, leaders, politicians, and ourselves. It’s easier to empower the strong man to crush this bogey-man in order to save the traditions of an idealized foregone era that would allow us to exit gracefully and in full comfort of things we recollect were better than they were.

This is an empty pipe dream where our flights of common sense and lack the fortitude to walk into the future become transparent weaknesses that offer windows into our violent tendencies. They ultimately repulse the masses at the reflection of our barbarity, and once again, people will wish for the peaceful future that we had become blind to. If we are lucky, a smarter leadership might jump into action, creating new engagements and progress that drag the masses forward out of their slide backward and humanity can continue the celebration of living in the luxury we have grown to take for granted.

I feel overwhelmed by the awareness that we are squandering the resource of knowledge by pandering to a majority we dare not ask to abandon their primitive base nature. We are rewarding behaviors incompatible with a species at the cusp of ever-greater enlightenment. This is a burden that weighs heavy in my mind and upon my heart.

Every day, I witness and am nearly forced by proximity to listen to banalities that groupthink and pop culture have qualified as legitimate aspects of a mature human being. By and large, we are hardly an inch away from the worst characteristics of our distant Neanderthal relatives: we are warlike, brutish, wasteful, and barely cognizant of the fertile grounds we carry between our ears. While we are certainly capable of modern communication and commerce with the wider world and have specialized skills, the same may have been said for the Neanderthals in that they were utilizing their own advanced modes of communication that were distinctly different than those of their animal neighbors. They were likely aware of the extent of their world as far as they understood it to stretch to and practiced specialized skills, be it for raising children, going on the hunt, gathering food, or entering battle.

Strength is still the largest measure of power, with its manifestation being ensconced in physical prowess or in the ability to gather money and weapons to cast the shadow of overwhelming fortitude and superiority. As a society and species, we are marginalizing the better half of our potential found in caring, thinking, sharing, and cultivating a culture that has largely been relegated as being secondary to a perceived constant threat from the “other.”

We are once again warming up our vulgar, angry selves, the part of people that starts a war and hinders human potential due to the need to cull the lower classes, who may present too much competition for resources that the powerful covet. While these epic battles have the ability to lay waste to the combatants, they also act as a filter to hide the simultaneous removal of activists and intellectuals who would otherwise try to rein in the abuses of power and give voice to those who do not have one.

This has been repeated time and again during the thousands of years of our evolution, and rather than learning from it as we have from agriculture, writing, math, and science, we continue to nurture this primitive Stone Age person found deep within and take pride in putting it back on a pedestal from time to time.

Suspicion of the other still lives on within our species, and those who would encourage this mistrust by stoking the flames of xenophobia are most likely preparing for battle. To fan the tinder of intolerance and breed this volatility is giving context to the justifications that are about to be unleashed for the pretext of a solution that, in an instant, will seem viable to those who will be set up for doing the bidding of attacking the other.

We’ve seen this specter of hostility following World War II and the perceived threat of communism when we invaded those we felt were leaning too far left. Today, we are trying to contain our rage against Islam and those countries that are producing refugees. In both situations, we identified the evil perpetrators and collaborators who became the new targets, and then, while making maximum noise about their threat to the internal stability of the republic, we entered into hostile conflicts. McCarthyism and islamophobia allowed us to focus our existential anxiety on enemies outside our borders who might otherwise corrupt our way of life. Today, we are taking aim at liberalism and intellectualism by attacking social programs, the news, and those who would protect gays and immigrants and who might change our gun laws under the pretext that once these lefties seize power, they will alter our way of life. The primitive and angry solution would amount to civil war; even if the battlefield is in other lands, our crisis is right here within our own minds.

I had once believed that America would not have a black president in my lifetime, and so it is my thought today that we will not reach escape velocity from the anchor that is the stupidity of our own doing. We carry the tribe of Neanderthal deeper within than our relatively recent adoption of racial hatred. I hope I’m wrong that the primitive dolt inside all of us is not going to rule the day.

I have a theory (probably not original) that words and numbers are the symbolic DNA that plays a large role in our intellect and has a significant influence on our personalities. While our social environment and economic situation during our formative years also impact our character, I believe it is our vocabulary and ability to form complex strings of words that are likely shaping the path of our potential.

While the double helix strands of DNA are the foundation of the genetic materials that dictate our physical being, I’m suggesting that strands of words form our mental being.

If a young person is surrounded by people with a limited vocabulary and half-functional intellect during the early years of development, how does he or she find mentors to benefit from and get inspired by? If no such person exists among family, educators, or circle of friends, can we rightfully hope that the young person finds inspiration on their own? At one time, television shows such as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers offered a one-size-fits-all blanket of conformity that tried to impart positive messages and improved vocabularies, but those shows have given way to apps that play on instant rewards, thus satisfying the dopamine wishes of the player, but rarely providing intellectual linguistic exercises.

If we had word games that offered more verbal play between the software and player, then maybe we’d start to see a general increase in vocabulary and, ultimately, in intellectual ability. The challenge would be how to involve parents to be part of the game or simply get them to start reading.

I thought I was done with this blog entry with the previous paragraph, and then I started thinking again about the roles of educators and was considering a teacher 50 years ago. They would have had a classical education without the influence of all-pervasive media. There are times when I’m listening to casual conversation in public, and if I don’t see the people who are talking, I can easily believe that the cackle I’m hearing is from some high school girls. Then I look over and see some youngish 30-year-olds, and as I continue listening I learn they are teachers. Their gossip is insipid nonsense that would have been of similar gossipy tripe when they were 14. Yet these are the people we have entrusted with raising young minds for the work of the future.

Education, I believe, will have to relegate its role of using people to bring learning to our populations to artificial intelligence that can be responsive to the immediate and near future demands of a workforce able to deploy greater knowledge. The very DNA of the intellect will shortly be forced to undergo a rapid evolutionary leap forward, or humanity will suffer the consequences of producing ever greater numbers of people ill-equipped to compete with smart machines.