Stay Away from Dogmas
Not only Hungry, Nor only Foolish
We’ve learn from history and on a daily basis (from the news) the cruelty of dogmas. In some odd way it seems that every aspect of our lives is now saturated by a monotheistic point of view; polarized, biased, intransigent. For this post I’ll use the term monotheism as a paradigm, for politics, economy or even technology.
The simple narrative of only one option, only one answer to the big questions has eased our minds for a long time. In the other hand, this narrative offers no alternatives for many of the complex endeavors of human experience, often leveling down what’s irreplaceable and leveling up what’s useless or mundane.
In the creative industry, We’re constantly reading the concept disruption; on startup manifestos, tech reviews, innovation articles, everywhere. Then, that big opportunity to define a different approach to some issues -apparently- simple to solve, ends up in a weak transgression, lame, far from revolutionary, only able to act inside a predetermined scheme. We already know creativity needs some constrains but this is quite another thing. You could call it minimum viable product or growth hacking, it doesn’t matter, it’s always about reducing the boundaries of the creative experience for the sake of only one specific technology, market or policy.
Thinking about pantheism.
Some early western pagan traditions followed concepts that understood space and time out of the abstract model of just one mere answer, but many answers inside every living thing, inside every inanimate thing; the answer was in pantheism. Later, all that knowledge was replaced with the monotheistic view. Even later, when western scholars encountered again a pantheistic set of beliefs on eastern culture, they had to translate that enormous set of entities, definitions and answers into just a few, in hope of making a kind of monotheistic comprehensible explanation of what they discovered.
To Silicon Valley has been attributed many of the innovations that We’re enjoying today. Silicon Valley has been the playground for many creative minds that were also influenced by the beatnik and hippie culture which indirectly, in their own way, embraced the contradictory chaos of many answers from pantheistic traditions. A futuristic socialism built on interdependence was praised on different expressions, even poetry. However, market’s ideology influenced again the feasibility of creative endeavors, replacing the slow paced chaotic development by the efficient and productive dogma. You don't have to go far to understand why PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel encourages startups to build monopolies. In some twisted way, Silicon Valley pioneers became what they originally despised.
In an age We’re getting deep into the Internet of Things (that ironically recalls the pantheistic living entities inside everything) in spite of the individuality of ideas, everybody seems to rely on the same algorithms to succeed, almost the same procedures, even the same markets... What’s the big achievement then?
Could our global economy manage the intricate nuances of different cultures? if that management advocates for the plural, but only defend one narrow way to achieve the goal, maybe there’s no reason to be so confident about it. In a multiple choice market, a multitasking workforce end up in a dead-end monotheistic way to solve problems. Despite this, the informal economy continues to find a way to overcome the difficulties, showing that there is always another answer.
Another issue that is becoming more evident as a sub product from all these tensions is a new shape of hierarchy in businesses and society as a whole. Recently Holacracy and the way to manage groups is getting notorious thanks to successful companies storytelling. Once again the topic of diversity comes as a revolutionary answer to a complex project. At this time there’s even some interest in testing Holacracy practices into government issues, like in liquid democracy and lately Futarchy.
The well known encouragement speech from Steve Jobs:“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” (an homage to the counterculture magazine: The Whole Earth Catalog), was a call to diversify our understanding of what really can make us enjoy life: choices, free will, nature. It is from our personal perspective that We make a clear distinction from a social trend or one way answer, and create our own culture realm, contradictory, funny, critical, beautiful, unique.
Let others do that too, stay hungry, stay foolish, stay away from dogmas and build our future.