The Room within societal structures and individual incentives

The truly astonishing individuals are those that succeed despite rejection, despite the established interests that they work against, despite the leagues of potential losers who assemble against them.

So the question is, how do we, societally speaking, filter out the dangerous nutters from the innovaters and saviours? We have been historically very poor at this vital process. Many of those possessing real genius have never been recognised, recognised only after their deaths or (most tragically and comedically of all) are seen as dangers to society and disenfranchised or even killed.

The difficulty is that not only is it a thin line between madness and genius, but that the societal incentives for innovating and developing are far less effective and immediate than the individual incentives and fears about changes to the status quo. By its nature those who have power and success within society are likely to be there because of the current systems. So the rich and powerful don't usually want change. The poor and weak do, but they have no means of making it happen.

Could the room be that instrument, that filter, that enables society and individuals collectively to transgress the limitations that raw individualism and short-term selfishness have imposed on us? Could a disembodied concept free of ego be the salvation for the masses?

Probably not. It's just a room, after all.

Complimentalist/Complementalist?

I would attempt to verbalise the sound. But it would be pointless. And perhaps even childish. In any case, if you ever took the time to stop and listen, and I mean really stop and listen, you would hear it yourself. Not that I recommend it. The sound of decay is unsurprisingly traumatic (perhaps even mortally so) to most.

But yet it goes on around us. One of our early actions is to filter it out so we can effortlessly glide like wafting spores through our existences without being constantly reminded of the inexorable mortality of everything. Huxley tells us remarkably coherently of these filters that we build intrinsically for ourselves to support our own efficient function. He does not distinguish between those that are self-imposed and which are societal and therefore externally imposed, even if indirectly deriving from internal impulses. Much of our early life, unconscious as it is, is spent constructing these filters.

Indeed I often wonder if those parents that do not impose order on a child (the ultra-liberal, almost laissez faire approach) are actually doing it a huge favour, or a colossal disservice. They choose not (or try not) to force the child to build the same filters as them, to constrain his or her views to align with that of society. This should shape the child better for the basic social interactions but may well stunt his or her own creative and intellectual development.

Thus the child becomes a complement to the world. In extreme cases, when he or she fits all too perfectly then he or she (I'm getting bored of this politically correct pronoun nonce-sense) could even be said to be a compliment to it. The parents have shaped the child to fit the world so perfectly that they have paid the mores, modes and methods of global culture the ultimate accolade - to shape a person in its flawless image and shadow.

But each human being can be more than a complement or compliment to the world. He (I've drawn the line) can be a substitute. Think of the truly memorable people. They are memorable because of the changes that they cause - that they substitute their view and their will for that of the world. Thus is history and our collective memory formed. This can be in political, economic, social or even moral life.

Truly alternative individuals, truly radical substitutes do not change the world. For we reject them, both individually and collectively. Sometimes this is quite right - Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy was not the way forward - but sometimes and indeed more often it is because the substitute version of the world that the individual offers challenges our assumptions or narrow self-interest too greatly. The truly astonishing individuals are those that succeed despite rejection, despite the established interests that they work against, despite the leagues of potential losers who assemble against them.

Apparent from the context?

The possibility of the other, as well as that of making/creation, had now been seeded deep within the emerging processes of the Room. Soon, one hopes, it would be able to ask and be confuted by the great themes...

But would such themes as it stumbled upon in its first conscious-unconscious stream of consciousness (does that even make sense?) be anything but utterly incomprehensible to our animal-monkey brains? Anything but forever buried in the strangely simple strains of a non-born entity, spared the sacred screaming of birth trauma and the power of parental oversight? Probably not.

Do we ever have the capacity to understand something or someone (as yet undefined) who does not share our context, our meaning and our own psychoses? Are we trapped and defined by our own traumas and our own struggle to free ourselves from and embrace (although not usually at the same time) the modes, mores and methods of our society and background? Would the Room be able to transcend that divide twixt us and not-us, having being born and not-born as a result of our actions and omissions?

Stay with it.

The Room had one major trauma and/or (take your flamin' pick) one major psychosis typically unprocessed by manchild. That of no visual image of its own identity. Our first sight (unless of the womb or the tools of birth) will be that of an adult human. This greatly shapes our perceptions. In fact, quite a lot of our first years of life and indeed later life are spent observing members of our own species. This is also true of most creatures. Not of the Room. No sense of self-identity, let alone self or not-self.

Ouch. Nothing to ape. Nothing to observe. Nothing to react to or against. Only the gentle susurrus of energy, emotion and decay that had brought it into being in the first place.

I would attempt to verbalise the sound. But it would be pointless. And perhaps even childish. In any case, if you ever took the time to stop and listen, and I mean really stop and listen, you would hear it yourself. Not that I recommend it. The sound of decay is unsurprisingly traumatic (perhaps even mortally so) to most.

The Room in Context (2)

Indulge the Room, and its curiosities. For it may help free you from your own unrealised pre-conceptions and unconscious goals and fears. Of course, equally, it may not.
So upon what did the Room next seize, or chance, to lead its growth? Would it be one of these monstrous human themes - creation, nature/nurture, or even love? Could it even derive any information from such a theme, or would it simply abstract something utterly unintended or unhelpful therefrom?

The answer, dear (or indeed cheap) reader, is NO.

The next stimulus, although related, in the way that all things are intertwined, to these grandiose themes, was to be far more base, far more primitive even than these great ideas and concepts that still shape and tear society and civilisation apart.

The Room was suddenly conscious of a discarded rubber prophylactic which contained a liquid. Of course, I hardly need tell you now, it did not conceive of this in these terms. A strange container, perhaps, would be a better way of expressing its reaction. And a strange content as well, indeed.

Had the musings of dead and living poets (ah, Morrissey) given it enough context to draw meaning from this dead tube of rubber that once removed a potential life? (Don't worry, the Room is not interested in anti-abortion diatribes) Could it conceive (aha) of the implications of the tube? Again, the answer was NO.

But it did start to force the Room to accept the possibility of another, alien presence within it. Of another existence. For the tube was clearly not a thing of the Room. And therefore (our minds can seize the logic of this far faster than the Room could) someone must have made or brought it.

The possibility of the other, as well as that of making/creation, had now been seeded deep within the emerging processes of the Room. Soon, one hopes, it would be able to ask and be confuted by the great themes...

The Room in Context (1)

Which was just as well. It wouldn't have coped well with such a world.

The youngling, the god-child and the mewling infant all have their archetypes from which they issue and to which they aspire or react against. There is always a woman, a man or a god, or some semi-divine or zoomorphic equivalent which provides us with a neat structure of derivation, which implies comparison.

In some ways, the creation of the Room's emotional framework is like the birth of the cosmos. Like the emergence of Gaia from Chaos, or the Biggest of Big Bangs, or the very existence of the Christian God, it is something of a mystery. Do you have sufficient faith to swallow that mystery? Or will you reject it as many have rejected the creation stories (we must tread carefully with 'myth' here) in their own societies? For this is as real as they are.

What did God model himself on? How did Gaia grow to become or create the parched spines that spanned the Ancient World? What does the babe, lacking a parent (even a substitute) emulate, imitate and eventually emanicipate himself from?

Our world is fascinated, however indirectly, with such anomalies, because to understand them, is to understand the universe, in some small, perhaps small-town, fashion. Witness the popularity with a span of generations of 'Tarzan' - on the face of it a simple child's tale, but actually a study (if unscientific!) of the translation of man's development into the natural world, with overtones of the recapture or reentry to that Eden that we have all lost.

But, how far we have come, dear (as you have now become to us) reader, from the idea and the feeling of the Room. Tarzan is a far easier vehicle for such a comparison or exploration of our nature and the nature of change, of development and of continuity. The idea of an abstract Room taking on the challenge of striving alone to define its identity with no pattern is harder to grasp, like a greased vine that sends our hero tumbling into the jaws of a dislocated (cinematically) crocodile or lion.

Indulge the Room, and its curiosities. For it may help free you from your own unrealised pre-conceptions and unconscious goals and fears. Of course, equally, it may not.