I seem to have a strong inclination to desire credit for the ideas I've put together. I speak to others about my own ideas and develop suspicious fantasies in which they take my ideas and publish them as their own and reap the benefits. But then a contradiction arises. Where did I get my own ideas? Did I not take them from others in the same process and present them as my own? What’s the difference? That I combined the ideas into a unique product that reflects my own unique creative character? But can’t my friends do this as well and claim originality? Thus beating me to the punch? Well, then we can nitpick about various amounts of work that went into the respective projects and we see that if one outright steals another work without doing work themselves, and then gets rewarded for it, we seem to have intuitions that conflict with that. But there’s more to this problem.
We see that some individuals are rewarded more than others. Is it because they worked harder? We see many that work as hard as you can possibly work and they still seem to be treading economic water. And who chooses what to reward whom with what? And by what right? Of course all of these questions could easily be answered with our current dominant ideological presuppositions. We reward the best because we value what they put forward the most. They are the best because they are the strongest or the smartest and this is all just and blah blah. But these lines of thought are no longer working. And they are boring anyways. What’s really happening?
Today’s pop stars make mounds of money and everyone buys their music. But for most of them I and many others whom I have talked to think the music is crap. What constitutes crap? Who has a right to say? Well that’s another question for another day. But we see here that some individuals are being rewarded for creations that many of us don’t really value, and whose said creations we aren’t even sure are that original or good. Same with today’s popular books and movies.
Of course, I’m being a bit coy here. We know there are groups in this culture that are more powerful than others, and are more able to influence the expressions of our dominant culture, and they control most of the economic means of manifesting these expressions and this is another problem altogether. But these naïve questions are worth asking when dealing with pure ideological issues.
We as individuals seem to be stuck with this strong inclination to lay claim to whatever we can get to first in the natural world, and then militate against any advances to this claim so that we may reap rewards by holding it. We have these strong inclinations due in part to the fact that our economic system handsomely rewards this behavior, which is a mechanism whose blueprint could be traced back to the individualist ideology itself. Is this the best way we can think and act in this natural world of ours? Are we doing our fellow travelers any favors with this line of thinking? Are we even doing ourselves any favors?
After all, our quality of living and general daily experience could be attributed to the many social connections we interact through on a daily basis. What happens to those connections when we are all set against one another in competition for natural resources? What happens to each individual as those connections are severed and whole sectors of society are slowly less enriched when another breaks away in power and accumulative powers?
I and many others keep our relationships for the most part because we don’t engage in this behavior. We don’t militate against our friends and families because we are suspicious they are going to steal from us. To do so (and sometimes this behavior is justified, though you can then trace those causes back even further and you end up becoming more confused) would be to break apart those relationships, probably resulting in a lot of pain.
And let’s get back to our discussion of ideas. Where do these ideas come from? You can trace their origins across thousands of thinkers across centuries. And each one contributes a bit to the overall cloud. So do I really know where I got all my ideas? Are my ideas original? Or just rearranged ideas from previous thinkers, mixed with my own subjective experiences and understanding of empirical facts, which can all be found in a public domain anyway? And if my ideas are decent, won’t other thinkers take them and make them their own as well?
So at this point we must ask, whom do we really reward and whom do we really revere? Sure it is ok to reward fantastic work, and it is okay to revere great figures as well, because well, they do exist. Some people are different than others. We don’t have to deny that. But shouldn’t we be thankful for our surrounding connections as well? Shouldn’t we be thankful for those who populate our lives? And for those that carry out the daily tasks that sustain our society? What is keeping them from being rewarded and revered as well? If at least modestly. And wouldn’t it be better for all of us as individuals if each of us were a bit happier in our day to day interactions? Now these are the things we should really consider.
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