Value

There are times when you reflect on your life – or should be. At times, it causes you to re-evaluate everything you know – when you come to some ‘truth’ that suddenly explains the world in a new and previously unexpected way. At other times, the reflection causes you to realize that you’re not good at certain things and very good at others. Still others simply reinforce whatever you already know.

Reflection requires time and honesty. As simple as these two may sound, massaging time out of our lives remains a daunting task – arguably more so in a world so connected. Honesty, too, can be difficult as individuality can be so easily substituted with ‘popular honesty’, where the inner compass is replaced by an outer compass.

Even as a few of us speak and write more and more of collective intelligence and how we’re part of a larger entity – our own species as a genus unto itself – do we think that because we are only smaller parts of a larger organism that we do not need to reflect?

It seems to me that out of all the species that we communicate effectively with, we’re the only one that reflects – and fewer and fewer people seem to be doing it. On the internet, social media has become more of a circulation system for ‘me too!’ than an area where we can reflect on ourselves as individuals and our own roles within a greater whole. Many measure worth in popularity when most – if not all – good new ideas started off in the realm of unpopularity. Many measure worth in financial terms, where a startup company that provides little actual value other than money becomes ‘successful’. Compounded, popularity drives money and money drives popularity – but where is the actual value? Or, as a society, is that all we are?

I wonder.

I recently wrote the title in an email to a discussion list I participate in. I'm not sure where it came from - whether I read it somewhere or heard someone say it - but I am fairly certain that it is true. Even as I read my own words echoed on the discussion list, I wondered at the truth of them. I could not find a weakness, but I did find abstraction inherently assumed in the statement. It is fair to note what is assumed, in fairness to myself and others.

Expectations are derived from many things. Part of expectations are heuristic - learned things. A child might think that an orange tree can produce bananas - in time, we can hope, that the child will learn the difference. Society does that - though, in all fairness, society is also seemingly committed to the same level of thinking that creates things people perceive as problems. As Albert Einstein once wrote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Despite itself, society has managed to progress - but as Ayn Rand notes:

The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements that men had reached - and to carry them further.

The bridges of which Ayn Rand writes would seem to coincide with the ratchet mechanism through which society has seen progress - sometimes, the ratchet slides back, but somehow society manages to move beyond any slips. The trouble isn't progress, the trouble is stagnation.