Given my latest psychological principle (the latest of my ongoing attempts to intuitively understand the societal phenomena that swirl around me), “in absence of a clear advantage, expect oscillation”, I am now wondering if there is an idealized Fourier space representation of cultural movements – that is, a theoretical way to convert the categorical periods, such as “modernism”, “classicism”, “baroque”, etc., into actual quantities and then to transform those quantities into frequency space for analysis. It makes no sense, and yet it verges on the edge of making sense because it seems the sort of thing an omniscient entity could do – to objectively quantify the similarity between two historical periods. It isn’t like the comparison has never been made before… anyone attempting to classify a piece of artwork or music must be able to extract some sort of rule that indicates “this is baroque”, for example.

Perhaps the quantities utilized could be more easily measurable things, such as “famous constructivist arguments” vs. “famous deconstructivist arguments” or, even better, “average hair volume” (now THAT’s oscillatory!)

The idea, of course, isn’t to analyze such stupid trends, but to get an idea of the common evolution of societal trends in general. For example, the average hair volume, as stupid a thing to measure as it seems, might be correlated with something less quantitative, such as the musical style of the time.

See? You can sort of dredge some sense out of it.

These are a few thoughts I was puzzling over, unsure of whether to state them because of their unconventionality. I suppose if I were trying to be conventional, however, I’m far too late. Here are three of the least conventional:

“Imposing forgiveness or forgetfulness on the people allows any atrocity to be perpetrated with impunity. There is a time and place to forgive. It cannot be blind.”

Flying in the face of the “forgive and forget” doctrine (which probably exists for precisely this reason, as most other doctrines that attempt to limit the moral behavior of the individual), this is the result of recognizing that anger and other strong emotions can indeed motivate great works (through the process of “sublimation”). It is also the recognition that your forgiveness very often does not cause others to rectify the wrong that they caused. By unconditionally forgiving, you are writing others a blank check to step all over you because they know there will be no consequences for doing so. Finally, forgiveness of this sort bars improvement. If an injustice causes you to recognize the flaws in a system, forgiving it prevents optimization of the system, affirming that the status quo is acceptable when it should not be!

Here’s another in a similar fashion:
“Above all, the consistency of memory is sacrosanct. Lacking this, one lacks
purpose – even orientation in time. As for society, a censorship of the past
prevents all change in the future – no one is left to cry out against
atrocity.”

1984 illustrates exactly why this is important pretty well.

And then there’s this:

“Never be the first to come up with a new idea. It won’t be accepted.”

I think Friendster (and MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, its main successors) probably made me realize this. My “Let’s Compose!” idea confirmed it. If you’re the first to come up with a sufficiently different paradigm, you will meet with failure. The first ones that copy your idea will probably be the ones to meet with wild success if anyone does at all. It’s pretty common.