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Radical Boy Manifesto: Instinct fails
We are our own worst enemies. Our instinct misguides us. It begins at a very young age. We believe, for example, as children, that we want everything that every other child has. We want all the food we can eat. We want to do everything there is to do. We want our parent’s total attention. This is what we believe. It is false.
In fact, if our parents were to permit us to follow our instinct, we would turn into spoiled and (worse) misguided children with no capacity for discerning what we really need and want from our internal imperatives to grab everything shiny, tasty and sexy.
It gets worse in adulthood, when we start trying to keep up with Jones’s. Is there any more well-documented yet incessantly repeated folly than that one? But you’ve all seen Fight Club, I don’t have to spell this one out.
The truth is, our instincts are misguided from birth. It’s when we overcome our impulses and focus that we ascend. Further, the story of history and human progress essentially comes down to this: we innovate new, large, collective pursuits that lock us into roles in which we are forced to do non-instinctual work that benefits us, our family, our neighborhoods. Maybe even our nation or world? We started with trades, got to government at different levels, colleges, big businesses, unions. Onward and upward.
If all the institutions went away, we’d all be foraging around following our guts and our nuts all over again. Make no mistake.
Instinct fails.
But I’ve already said that reason fails, too. So what do we do?
We look to The Artist.
Radical Boy Manifesto