Introduction
Financial crises abound! No one, including the experts, is quite sure of what to do to prevent a major case of deflation. This has never happened before.
Well, change is like that. It's OK. We have to change. The old stuff wasn't working right. The ME generation, whichever one that was, left us all looking out for ourselves and forgetting the human factor and lots of our values. Freud's explanations of how social stuff worked left us believing that we were rational creatures, and looking for motive in everything we do. NEWSFLASH ! We aren't all that rational. Lots of times we JUST DO STUFF.
No one sat down and rationally figured out that capitalism (with its markets) wasn't working like it was supposed to. Others were making financial killings in real estate, so why not me, too? People at Merrill Lynch were supposed to know better. But million dollar bonuses are tempting. almost as good as the FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. Surprise! Getting rich without working hard at it, developing real skills, being accountable to the Other, and recognizing that lemmings had a point, that when we stop thinking and behaving as individuals, we're just likely to go right off a cliff is a very risky scenario.
Stuff happens. It helps to sit down and ponder why it happens. But it also helps to recognize there are lots of things humans still don't know. Sometimes what we do has consequences that we don't expect - like credit crises, market failures, climate change. Some of these things we do, we do for a reason. And some of these things we just do. Like Freud's Wolfman, who attacked the therapist, and then spent forever trying to find a rational explanation for why he did so. Not all action is preceded by rational thought.
Sometimes we think we know why we do things. But then we find out that what we thought we knew didn't match reality. So we have to change our minds. That's not a sign of weakness, though politics is full of charges of flip flops. That's one of the ways we learn. But if we think we already know everything, then we're not likely to even recognize that what we thought we knew isn't working anymore. Maybe that's why change is so hard.
Now all this is what I was thinking about as I set out to create a project for a piece of wearable art that would attract attention and give me a chance to talk about our "need" to be "rational." So all the projects that grow out of this will forever represent the Freud's Wolfman for me. I doubt that anyone will ever approach me and ask me what I've learned from Jonathan Lear's analysis of the behavior of Freud's Wolfman, but I can almost guarantee that someone will ask me about these crocheted socks, or the bracelet I've made from them, or any one of the other goodies I've made from this once simple little sock pattern. And, THEN . . . I get to tell them about "knowingness" and the trouble with always assuming rationality.
I'll bet the combination of my telling the story over and over, and the neat little postcards or bookmarks I make to give away with the story, mean that hopefully what I've made for my wearable ART will become a permanent reminder of the Wolfman and Freud and Jonathan Lear's "knowingness." That becomes LEARNING FOR LIFE. The more I share it, the more the learning becomes part of me, and the more that sharing becomes part of my community.
Now that, for me, is EDUCATION.
This need to sort out why we're doing things is something we need to be conscious of in order to recognize how much of what we do is not thourght through. Just look at our cavalier attitude to the melamine that has caused such trauma in China. Turns out we don't really know how much our children get here. Our Home-Grown Melamine Problem
By James E. McWilliams. New York Times. Published: November 17, 2008 (consulted by jeanne on November 17, 2008). Some stuff is conscioous; some stuff is automatic (what we DO all the time because we've always done that). Time to start being AWARE of which actions need a little thought behind them; and time to start talking about the need for thoughtful action in our everyday lives. The world is too complex today to wander through it as an automaton. This isn't science fiction. There really IS melamine in our food supply. We just don't know how much because we haven't bothered to be aware, except for China's mistakes, of course. Another lesson in the need to respect the Other. Except for the Grace of God, there go we, also.
I'm writing on the file for this, and here in topic of the week. Sometimes I add to one and not the other. So check Talk About What Matters and this file until I finish this piece. jeanne
love and peace, jeanne
Remember what John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, famously said when he was accused of flip-flopping on his views about government intervention in the markets during the Great Depression: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
From Dealbook, a New York Times blog.Sorkin: In Praise of Changing Your Mind.November 12, 2008, 1:11 pm
References:
References:
A Justice Site
jeannecurran@habermas.org
