The Collision of Intelligence
The more we lubricate social interaction, the more intelligence we share.
I don't remember much of my life before my teen years. I lived in a little house in Altadena California. I do remember that our family bonded by eating dinner together every night, a tradition I have slavishly tried to maintain. We would also sit in front of our 10" black and white RCA TV set on Sunday nights and watch Lassie, Walt Disney and The Ed Sullivan Show. Those moments gave me an enduring love of music, comedy and live entertainment.
I mentioned earlier how influential Walt Disney has been in my life. He was brought into my life on television, which in the big picture, may be the most influential thing in all of our lives.
The point is I am a child of the Television Revolution. My entire existence has been heavily influenced by the presence of a multifaceted electronic box that exposed me to most of the Transformative Moments in my lifetime.
If driving while texting is recognized as an extremely dangerous and distracting activity, I think it fair to say that watching TV, and using it as the main source of information, is an equally dangerous way to navigate your life. The information is vital, but the process can, and does, produce unintended consequences.
In the New Normal World of Digital Information and Entertainment Overload, the average person is easily overwhelmed. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all grasping for a virtual umbilical cord to reattach to a childlike sense of our Mothers secure embrace.
In the 50's and 60's, TV was growing in influence, but it was still regarded as a luxury. It was part of the daily menu in some households, but not the main dish. For most people, it was desert. Something you enjoyed to end the day.
They say a person's character is the sum of their moral qualities and history of attributes that demonstrate good behavior. How we acquire those attributes is up to debate. Some say many are genetic qualities we inherit from our parents. Some insist character is a learned trait that must be fostered and perfected through life experiences. Either way, everyone agrees that we all possess a certain degree of good and bad characteristics simultaneously.
Wouldn't it follow that the character of our nation, our culture and our American legacy be determined and expressed in similar fashion? I think it is also fair to say that America is both amazing and flawed. And I think it is fair to say that the TV medium has played a major role in spreading information and sharing experiences that otherwise could not be accessed.
I can honestly say that as the ubiquity of the television, and now personal electronic devices, has grown, the collision of social idiosyncrasies has increased exponentially. And though our minds are much fuller with data, we humans are struggling with sorting it all out.
We are suffering a collision of intelligence, a distortion of perception.
It is incredibly popular to develop a deep sense of self. An awareness of inner feelings, of subtle and not-so-subtle energy fields and to spend significant time and resources to practice "mindfulness". We take classes and read books and listen to coaches to gain advantages over others and to enhance our sense of confidence and accomplishment.
Millions focus their energies on joining movements or affinity groups to gather and promote ideas, lifestyles or belief systems. These kinds of motivational ambitions are generally healthy and productive. But there is a side effect: They all create conflicting social identities. As much as we hope to use them to bring people together, they often have the opposite effect. Especially as the numbers of specialty groups and movements multiply, they tend to divide us, rather than unite us.
“Mindfulness can make you selfish,” says Michael Poulin, PhD, an associate professor of psychology. “It’s a qualified fact, but it’s also accurate.”
One of the obvious advantages of developing "awareness" and social interdependence skills, is the increasing levels of intelligence gathering. The more we lubricate social interaction, the more intelligence we share. But more is not always better, because much of intelligence, if absorbed in a vacuum, is useless. It must be vetted and in context, and most social settings don't allow for that.
Look at how much information is currently available in our multimedia environment. One of the most ubiquitous issues is the girth of "misinformation" or at least what some groups want to label as that. The result? Total confusion and social chaos. And the polarization of society. Even the President uses the term "Extremists" to describe his opposition, which is essentially half the population.
Each decade has had a signature identity. For me it started with the Sixties: The era of cultural and racial upheaval. The decade of anything goes, streaking public events and love-ins, civil rights, student protests, and heartbreaking acts of violence and assassinations. It was a time of rejection of authority and wars of liberation all over the world. The sixties could be summed up in one word: Change.
The Seventies brought us the Sexual Revolution and Vietnam, which undermined our regard for our political leaders and led to a growing cultural divide between men and women. It featured enormous advances in technology as we cashed in on some of the discoveries prompted by space exploration. Some say it fostered a new sense of individualism in response to the "we culture" of the sixties, author Tom Wolff wrote that it was the "me decade".
The Eighties demonstrated the near psychotic confluence of television and visual media, and how every affinity group could use them to promote themselves. It witnessed the launch of MTV, and the merging of pop culture with sound and video.
America was growing increasingly dependent on entertainment and drugs. And the worldwide population was also booming. The planet suffered food shortages prompting a coalition of rockers to sponsor the Live Aid concert in 1985. Radical Islam was born in the form of Al Qaeda, and we experienced the beginnings of nano technology and biological experimentation with the human genome. It was the era of Tribal Expansionism.
The Nineties was dominated by the introduction of the world wide web leading to the great dot-com bubble and crash. The inevitable expansion of human awareness spurred new and old cultural conflicts, demands for new and improved trade agreements, and a booming travel industry. I think of that decade as the New World of the New World.
Then came 9/11 and everything changed again. It was like flipping the north and south poles. For me, it was essentially my Pearl Harbor. Everything I thought I knew had to be questioned. The Yin and Yang in my head collided that day. The entire nation was energized and stupefied at the same time. Everyone, regardless of political persuasion, became Americanized. We proudly flew American flags, sang patriotic songs and screamed out the National Anthem at sporting events. Americans made anti-Muslim statements, and agreed the Islamic Jihad, led by Osama Bin Laden, was responsible. But those indiscretions only opened the door for blame-America first leftists who quickly started sowing seeds of dissension across America.
All of the mostly "Born In America'' cultural anomalies founded during the last half of the 20th century, were quickly redefined as Progressive.
Women's liberation, civil rights advances, the sexual revolution, the death of the nuclear family, and the "right" to have an abortion, were no longer an outgrowth of American populism, but the enemy of that line of thinking. It was deemed that America was not being attacked by radical movements, but that resisting those attacks was itself an attack on American democracy.
That narrative has only gained momentum as of now.
Hollywood filmmakers, recording artists, TV writers and actors, even public school teachers, all jumped on board the Woke Movement, twisting anything patriotic into some sort of racial issue, or an attempt to return our culture to a time when America was being built on the backs of slaves by Christian extremists and women haters. This tactic is simply a way to transition the public to accepting a subjugation of our Constitution, which vests all power to the people.
We are currently picking up the pieces of this head-on collision of ideologies: The Conservative view that our American Constitutional Republic is the greatest experiment in public policy and governing ever invented, has its problems. But, they are by far the least offensive of any massive National Powerhouse anywhere else on the planet. Or the opposite Woke Progressive view, that a state educated populace, using digital communications, is far better equipped to make the best decisions for the community, and that in a majority-rules democracy, the objectives must align with the preservation of the environment and the right to abort unborn babies at any stage of development. Period.
We are standing in the intersection where the collision of intelligence has occurred, looking at the massive amounts of debris, the blood and gore, the skid marks and the broken bodies, and asking ourselves, which of these two battered machines is trustworthy enough to lead us into the future?
The Rub is that we have the map right in our hands. It tells us what works and what doesn't. It points the way, but too many of us are impatient, or are unwilling to listen to anything from the past, and are anxious to pioneer new frontiers by rejecting advice or experience, simply because it comes from "old white people".