Original Thought

I've been thinking a lot about the concepts of original thought and the origin of thought lately.  In my posts about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, one of the techniques I mentioned involves taking our thoughts and our beliefs in the moment and deconstructing them, asking the question "Why do I think that?" repeatedly helps us trace back the origin of our thoughts and our beliefs to see where they formed, what or who influenced those beliefs and how they have served us.  Throughout this process you often discover that certain beliefs develop as the result of life experiences; those experiences however can often be interpreted in different ways and looking back on them with a new perspective and a new set of experiences that happened since can completely change the conclusions that we drew in the first place.

Two people can experience the same thing and walk away from it with completely different perspectives and wildly differing conclusions that they drew, the purpose of CBT in this scenario is to put your beliefs into context and put the original experiences into the context that you can now perceive that you could not at the time and see what changes.  Whilst this can have real world implications, and implications for our own mental health, one of the things I found interesting when exploring this technique was the idea of original thought, that is to say thoughts that occur to you without the influence of others, is in fact extremely rare.  There will be a lot of people who will take issue with this assertion but I believe most of the opposition to this idea stems from ego and not from an objective stance.

I've written in the past about the nature of tropes in fiction and in the creative process of writing where whether intentional or not, most works of fiction can be broken down into components that are shared with other works of fiction.  I've also spoken about the rabbit hole you can fall down if you visit sites like TVTropes which document these in great detail, the plenitude of lists that abound with each article showing examples of those tropes in practice.  This concept however is one you can extend to life itself and in particular apply it to human behaviour, speech patterns, vocal inflections, and the development of beliefs, desires, and intentions.

When you turn to introspection with such depth and develop many hypotheses about your own behaviour it is inevitable that you will seek more data to test your theories and that inescapably leads to increased observation and judgement of those around you, friends, family, and strangers who you regularly interact with.  You reach a point where you become aware of others behaviour with a level of consciousness that is heightened.  Like that moment where you start to notice your own breathing and suddenly have to pay attention to it and maintain the process, unable to consciously resume that automatic function.  When you are in this state of mind you start to listen to people in a new and interesting way, not just hearing what they say and taking it in, but noticing the inflections, the pauses, the gesticulations, the mannerisms that you otherwise don't dwell on.  You also begin to notice patterns in speech where you realise that certain subjects come up time and again and realise those form a foundation for interaction with others for those individuals.

The most interesting part about this whole observational process is when you identify beliefs or rhetoric specifically that are rigid or that conform to an existing framework.  In these moments certain phrases or the choice of words a person uses hint at the origin of those thoughts and you begin to realise who exactly influences their behaviour.  There is a theory that in a social context everyone in the world can be connected through six steps or less known as the six degrees of separation.  When you take this theory in parallel to this observation you begin to realise that there are only a handful or prominent public figures, celebrities, and those in the public eye who speak with their own voice and that most peoples' articulations, their vocabulary, and their lexicon in general are an extension of one or more of those individuals.

This puts you in a very interesting place when it comes to arguments and debates that arise between you and those people, you begin to realise that to argue with those people is by extension or by proxy an act of arguing with the person that influenced them, and that even if you can put forward successful arguments that convince that person to change their point of view, you don't by extension change the source and that source will continue to influence that person and inevitably the person you managed to convince will once again succumb to the views of the source.  To put it another way the source is a fire burning up on the roof of the building, and the embers that fall from it ignite those below, if you only ever extinguish the fires below without ever extinguishing the fire on the roof then the building will continue to burn because those embers will continue to fall.

Realising therefore that arguing with these people achieves nothing, the question then turns to whether you can tackle the source and unfortunately in most cases you can't for the simple reason that you'll never get anywhere near it in order to do that.  This does lead to an internal conflict where on one hand you want to challenge these beliefs and contribute to the fight against them but on the other you realise this for the most part is futile.

The idea that most thoughts formed in a social context within the social constructs that exist all stem from a handful of people makes some sense when you consider the world and the seemingly synchronised movements that occur.  Whilst we like to divide ourselves into nations, cultures, race, and all manner of human constructed segregations the reality is that we share the same planet and we share the same culture the whole world over, yes those subdivisions exist and they can cause problems in themselves but taking the idea that we are removed from each other and not influenced by one another is asinine and in many ways arrogant.

Those who would divide us, do so in order to control who can influence us, whose voice we hear and whether or not we listen, on the flip side those who would unite us attempt to do so through counter culture and opposing arguments which do not achieve their stated goal, the only way to achieve true unity in this regard is through inclusion, when you can bring together all of the voices of influence but this idea is still obstinately opposed by those who can not countenance including those whose opinions differ markedly from their own, and this applies to all points on the political compass.  The 20th century is often cited by some as one of the longest periods of peace in our history particularly in a European context, with the end of the second world war there emerged a united political consensus one where almost all voices of influence save a few were in favour of the same thing, this came to an end when a handful of prominent politicians abandoned this discourse. 

The world as it exists today is therefore the result of the actions and the influence of far fewer people than it first appears to be.  Those who argue therefore that public figures and celebrities who seemingly have no political experience should stay out of politics are making a massive error in judgement.  To counter the prevailing mood of the world today and shift our discourse back to consensus we need more people to be vocal, we need everyone who has influence to use that influence, failure to do so out of fear is what got us to this point in the first place, those who are not happy with the state of the world need to be vocal and that sadly applies most of all not to you and me but to that small group of people who most people in the world watch so closely.  I have stated many times before that I hate 'X Factor Politics' where popularity determines success but that is the world we live in no matter how much we me protest the idea we still engage in it whether we are willing to admit it or not, this is a game that can only be played with strategy, and it is impossible to develop a winning strategy without identifying the rules of the game.  You can only rewrite those rules when you have power, if you want to rewrite those rules from opposition then you need to amass power first.