Creativity through Stupidity
“Why save you?” says Neytiri to Jake Sully after killing the wolves who were attacking him. “You have a strong heart, no fear. But stupid, ignorant like a child.”
“If I’m like a child, teach me.”
“People cannot learn if they cannot see.”
“Then teach me to see.”
“No one can teach you to see.”
Jake, a war vet marine, was the twin brother of a Phd Scientist who died. Jake was like a child — pure heart, innocent, love of life, no fear (even when he should), naive, experimenting, unknowledgeable, stupid, ignorant and irreverent.
“It is hard to fill a cup that is already full” says Neytiri’s mother.
“Oh I’m empty” says Jake.
It is this stupidity that creates such interest and delight, sense of adventure and excitement.
“I see you” is their deep empathetic connected greeting.
The tree of souls, like the tree of life in the garden of Eden, stands at the centre of their universe, its roots connects all earth and all beings, like the outstretched arms of the people fanning out, together as one. It has a physical electrical-chemical connection to all the people — more synapses than the human brain.
What our tutor has been trying to teach us is to see the everyday in a whole new way (e.g. Kitchen Stories — I haven’t watched it yet, but its arriving on DVD).
This pureness of ‘stupidity’ contrasts with the ‘knowledge’ in The Republic. In the Republic you need a high level on knowledge to govern. In Avatar, what won out in a time of crisis and war was to think completely differently, completely out-of-the-box, which required an empty mind (empty in the way meditation created the ‘vast unlimited space of mind’).
Empathy was valued over Knowledge in Pandora (Neytiri’s planet).
In ‘Years and Years’ (BBC/HBO) Britains power networks were hacked so often by the Russians, that institutions resorted to printing everything out and buying filing cabinets.
Facebook’s policy of pleasing their customers by showing them what they wanted to see turned into an echo-chamber that rocked the democracy of the United States and swung the Brexit referendum in the UK.
Whilst Larry Fink’s ‘Aladdin’ computer manages $21.6 trillion for BlackRock by amassing so much data about everything that it can predict world events, and therefore fluctuations in the market (according to Alan Curtis in Hypernormalisation). That’s the opposite of ‘empty’. I can’t help think that Big Data is not the way for a utopian future. I think a simpler, old fashioned, more meaningful, more personal approach is what is needed to make people happier.
