During my lifetime, this may be the weirdest moment of many very strange times.
In the fifties, I simply could not fit into the society around me. I tried. Like any kid, I wanted to be normal, but I never felt in synch with the people around me .
So, I developed a coping strategy. I faked being like everyone or anyone else. I was an actor.
A decade later, in the mid-sixties, I discovered my cohort -- other alienated kids who thought too much. One epiphany was that other people also liked Faulkner's novels and stories, as obscure and difficult as they may be to absorb.
Still others loved the beauty of numerical patterns (my math phase); even others were left speechless when witnessing the paintings of masters, or rather, sections of paintings. Think: Rembrandt's black.
Then, there was music. I was never a good musician in any sense of the term. But I did study piano in an era when the only music taught was classical. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Brahms, Chopin, Schubert...each with his own distinctive flavor, beat, and emotional arc.
But my music genius friends knew far more about this than I could ever hope to perceive.
Then, there were my fellow Econ majors. Unlike me, they seemed to be able to accept the caveat attached to all economic theories, as explained to us by Paul Samuelson, i.e., "all other things being equal."
No, I protested, all other things are never equal.
Next came philosophy. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Lucretius, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, among others. I loved these guys' writings, but I probably absorbed Hegel above all others. His sense of the dialectics of history seem as relevant today as the era when he wrote them.
In the seventies, the political and cultural revolution I and my peers assumed would occur was stopped dead in its tracks.
In the eighties, the world around us changed in scary ways. Suddenly, no one seemed to cared about social justice any more. America was a land of every man (and woman) for himself (herself).
Finally, in the mid-nineties, a new information revolution arrived. The web ushered in a libertarian, anarchist age. As the consummate outsider, all of my strange life, I embraced this. But I also argued strenuously against some of the carelessness of this new generation of revolutionaries.
What about the social and environmental externalities? Homelessness? Global climate change? Entrenched poverty?
Now comes the new century. Maybe we need Hegel now more than ever? Or maybe we need Mozart? I don't know. As it has been all of my life, I am so far outside of the mainstream, that the only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing at all.
-30-
1 comment:
When all seems uncertain, certainty within is all that is lost. - Danogramusa.
You and I are, each, one of six (going on seven) billion people, standing on one rock in a flock of odd boulders circling a rather common star in the remote reaches of a rather common galaxy - populated with several hundred billion such stars - in a universe (though as yet poorly defined) containing perhaps 500 billion galaxies. Well, I don't know about you, but pretty much everything outside my skull seems generally beyond my control and, by definition, uncertain. And there have been those days when certainty within my skull seemed just as elusive.
Acting on guesses is what we humans do, in the absence of certainty. With practice many of us achieve a tolerable level of (what we think to be) successful outcomes, when acting on our "best" guess.
We generally get ourselves into trouble when we overestimate our "certainties". Better for you, then, to know precisely what everyone else knows, "...nothing at all".
Here's wishing you the "best guess" for every occasion.
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