It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!"
The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...
This is incredibly hard hitting and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also afraid it would "trigger" quite a few people today.
What steps can a person take to get out of pop culture and try to get into the same league as the inventors? Incredibly stupid question to have to ask but I feel really lost sometimes.
I think it is first a recognition problem -- in the US we are now embedded in a pop culture that has progressed far enough to seriously hurt places that hold "developed cultures". This pervasiveness makes it hard to see anything else, and certainly makes it difficult for those who care what others think to put much value on anything but pop culture norms.
The second, is to realize that the biggest problems are imbalance. Developed arts have always needed pop arts for raw "id" and blind pushes of rebellion. This is a good ingredient -- like salt -- but you can't make a cake just from salt.
I got a lot of insight about this from reading McLuhan for very different reasons -- those of media and how they form an environment -- and from delving into Anthropology in the 60s (before it got really politicized). Nowadays, books by "Behavioral Economists" like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, etc. can be very helpful, because they are studying what people actually do in their environments.
Another way to look at it is that finding ways to get "authentically educated" will turn local into global, tribal into species, dogma into multiple perspectives, and improvisation into crafting, etc. Each of the starting places stays useful, but they are no longer dominant.
What steps would a group of people (civilization?) need to take in order to make progress here? When choices are abundant, the masses have been enabled, and yet knowledge is still at a premium?
All cultures have a lot of knowledge -- the bigger influences are contextual and epistemological (i.e. "points of view" and "stance", and "what is valued", etc.)
Self-awareness of what we are ("from Mars") is the essential step, and it's what real education needs to be about.
The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...