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How authoritarian cultures suppress creativity by undermining self-trust

6 tweets · May 2019 · 66 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter

The Guru Papers talks about how self-trust is consistently undermined by authoritarian cultures (read: almost all cultures in the world today, to greater and lesser degrees) creating internal battles for control.

@visakanv comments on the lack of self-trust thing here here:

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

It’s interesting to me how many people consistently undervalue their own experience and their own feelings. Both are extremely valuable. The best book you could possibly read is IMO the book of your own life

Visa then goes on to describe the creativity that results from learning to value your own experience & feelings:

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

The people we worship as creative and artistic geniuses are really just the people who realized this to be true, and then put in the decades of work to articulate it artfully - whether in poetry or product design or by raising a family, whatever. Full-contact living

The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf points out that this link between self-trust and creativity (or lack of both) is not a coincidence! If people are creative, they will innovate new solutions to their problems. New memes. Culture changes.

Therefore, in order for a society's memeplex to be stable, it needs to inhibit peoples' creativity, which it does by putting them at war with themselves.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

The 10 percent of the brain myth is actually onto something! ...but it's not that 90% isn't not in use—it's that... most people have 45% fighting another 45%, so on net there's 10% useful capacity.

We've started to crawl out of the pit of the purely static attractor, but our cultures still inherit a ton of baggage that impairs peoples' creativity! In transition, quite far from being able to make a relaxed fall into a new dynamic attractor.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@cognazor @KeenDisregard This transition phase has properties that are different from the static society and different from the dynamic society, and in ways that are probably hard to predict because it's happening at a boundary, rather than within a given system.