Jargogled Impressions.

How often do you chase or actively search for ideas that catch you off-guard and unsettle you? Those ideas that challenge some deeply-held beliefs and assumptions and whose integrity rests on everything you have seen or experienced during your lifetime. Ideas in the way I refer to here is amorphous and can straddle both the physical and the metaphysical world. Beauty, for instance, is in fact an idea that some chase and constantly get tripped over. Some run after the wide spaces inside their minds and weave narratives as pre-supposed ideas they hear inside their own heads. Ideas that are brewed as a craft in the winding corridors of our minds traipse over our real world, often conflicting with what we see. But coming from the deep recesses of our emotions and cumulative experience, they continue to hold their stead in the face of contradictory data. It’s when data recedes to being crippled by emotional angst and debauchery.  

Art, in its various forms aspire to be a vaunted source of ideas. Much as how the ideas that form in the cavernous worlds of science fiction become sources of inspiration and panic at the same time, breakthrough artists chase new ideas both in terms of their representational techniques and forms (technique), framings or re-framings of existing opinions and views (phenomenology), and net new ideas on the basic human condition (philosophy). The last of these dimensions that artists typically chase in their creative pursuits and projects is predicated on a few constructs, with inversion being one of them. In many ways, inversions are ideas that are by-design unsettling and unintuitive.

Ancient stoics conducted regular mental exercises known as ‘premeditatio malorum’, which translates to “premeditation of evils” to reverse-engineer possible paths of how something could go horribly wrong in the future and tracing its path back to the present moment. In modern lingo, a sort of risk modeling minus the data mumbo-jumbo and garnished with imaginative leaps of the mind. When applied to art though, inversion often turns out to be dystopic, dismal, and draconian in their attributes. Often, for drama and for maximum weight, the act and technique of inversion ends ups becoming a caricature of our worst fears and premonitions. As Viktor Shklovsky pointed out, art is not merely a way to actualize the beauty of the world but also reflect on, depict, and forecast its horrors. So, it’s not just the zombie-world scenario that COVID-19 panic-mongers are attempting to paint for us but what Li Wenliang attempted to do before being silenced by the regime.

Inversion techniques, much like technology, are but servants of our own assumptions. How we use them, is eventually driven by our beliefs and intrinsic biases about how we think the world works. For inversion to enable us to overcome our fears of negative outcomes and experiences, our assumptions need to be put on trial. And for us to be prepared for whatever the future has in store for us, our mental models need to be conscious of the assumptions and belief systems we take for granted in our daily lives. How often do we take a step back and actively assess and challenge our assumptions? How are we to interpret and dissect the unknown unknowns that many of our beliefs become over the eons of human evolution we have experienced?

Ideas and assumptions are post-modern cousins in the playground of human mental faculty. When hidden assumptions and beliefs – often themselves based on ideas that may have ceased to be useful or relevant – are challenged, they become core components of a new set of ideas. The visible lifecycle of an idea then begins its journey from a radical offshoot (heresy, blasphemy, childish, silly) to becoming either mainstream or dying a slow, painful death. Assumptions are predicated on our innate tendencies to optimize our mental workload and offload non-essential “givens” into buckets of beliefs that we, over time, end up making part of our objective reality.

When this pre-supposed reality, nurtured over years of personal experience and utility, collides with a change in the playing turf or a shift in the atmosphere, the precarious nature of our reality, and in turn our ability to deal with it bubbles up to the surface. As experts in our own worlds, its far easier to deny this change. Inertia and an affinity to the known makes it more likely that you continue to erect defensive barriers against this encroaching ‘idea-virus’. As Elon Musk describes it, most people often “live life by analogy” or by extending existing forms and assumptions forward instead of a fresh-off-of-a-UFO-from-Mars view that does not carry with it any baggage of the norm or the supposedly ‘real’. Carrying forward the COVID-19 example, our response to the spiraling crisis calls out our assumptions and fears in the most visible of frames. We see and observe people around us doing and extend it to our own thinking. As Taleb describes it, it was “irrational” to panic about the virus in its early stages of dissemination but acting conservatively and panicking individually could have been a better risk management technique versus being complacent about our systemic contagion prevention capabilities.

Why it is SELFISH to not worry more about the virus than other sources of risk even if it does not affect you as much.

Individual precaution does not scale to collective precaution.
[Adding to PRINCIPIA POLITICA] pic.twitter.com/F7jRKAQ4dz

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 5, 2020

An “Original”, the way Adam Grant describes it, is someone who refuses to conform to notions and assumptions, both from the external world as well as from their internal belief systems. Originals think original ideas that seek to non-conform with established wisdom or assumptions and is willing to act on this idea. How do they do it? They see things differently or they de-familiarize their environments. Put another way, they actively seek ideas that challenge their own assumptions about how the world works. A technique to de-familiarize yourself is to adopt a first-principles thinking to the most interesting, hairy, or boring problems you have on your plate. Stripping away your assumptions to the barest, most foundational ones lets you create or design a world which may be unsettling at first but provides a garage-space for bringing art and originality in this world.