A Disappeared Mural: The Delicate Creation of the Future in a World Full of Rage

We need to talk about academic generation, stalking, financial starvation, and the erasures of anger.

Imagine an artist, painting a genuinely new design. They are standing in front of their painting every day, refining techniques, criticizing their work, thinking of new directions. In the beginning, the pencil movements are light and grey, lots of lines pointing to different things, occasionally congealing in a recognizable form. Looks boring.

Then comes the base. If you have ever painted in acrylic and you need to give off the illusion of an ongoing warmth, you may put down yellow paint first with a generous white topping throughout the entirety of the canvas. What a lunatic! Who just puts yellow paint on everything!

At this point, someone may say,

“I would stop you but I don’t know what you’re doing.”

Let’s unpack that. First of all, this person clearly thinks your work has an effect on them, which is why they think stopping it is an appropriate step they can take. Let’s say, for instance, that you were drawing out the architecture of the broken abbey you were painting. The person asks you to stop and explain it to them, before it has been completed. If you oblige them, they may nod and sell your plan out from under you, and you won’t be able to complete without being slandered. If you don’t oblige, they will continue in their bad faith and patriarchal investigation of what is not yet ready for public address. In essence, they interrupt the creative process because it needs to make sense to them first and foremost. This is the capitalist drive towards appropriation; their interest is not an in-itself but a promise that they can upend your position somehow resulting in their higher one. If that doesn’t seem the case, the capitalist’s interest, which only exists for future profit — a one-up from your awareness of the situation, consented to or not — will fade away or even turn to rage. So, what might be a secure design for creativity may see a failure of investment because it is not familiar, it does not annex easily to known methods of appropriation, nor does it promise to submit itself later to something that could not originate it from the beginning — aka, it is not capitalizable (minimum effort for them, high profit…also for them.)

Things start to go well. Now we’re adding different colors, purples and blues. We’re adding depth, light, it’s still chunky but the form is coming into coherence. The nuances of light have yet to come fully to completion. That’s planned for the next step.

Now we have a new person. They take a look. Huh, this person is actually making an assertion instead of just blending into the background. And it’s looking kind of good. It doesn’t look like a completed piece of art yet though…because it’s not, and this person is the evaluator, the person who comes to appraise at completion. Like an absent father, they are not engaged supportively with the child, and the process is unfamiliar territory.

Next, comes the mother-in-law of art and design; “I know what you’re doing but you’re not good.”

This is called a bluff. This is when someone perceives they have the correct model of a design before it is completed. The best they can do in such a case is speculate. When they speculate, “you’re not good” or “you are good”, they are hoping to win their position. When someone has a massive loss impending if what they perceive is actually going to be quite good, they launch what is called a speculative attack. Usually when they speculate in the negative it is again because they see no sufficient understanding that can allow them to appropriate, to capitalize, on the finalized product.

A speculative attack can either attempt to delegitimize the value of a threatening invention by arbitrarily and forcefully insisting on a devalued position ready for it before it can arrive, or it can attempt to destabilize the value of the incoming invention, policy, or theory so that it can not accrete the necessary consensus to attract funding (you would be surprised how many financial institutions require everyone to be in relatively good favor with the idea, and that unfortunately requires it to be relatively unthreatening — excellence is almost always relatively threatening.)

Should the design continue despite these attacks it can come to completion. At that point the natural gravity of the completed project may survive the cancerous growths of speculative attack, by naturally attracting. Unfortunately, if it has been subject to such cruelties, what is natural attraction may be read through the vitriolic preset readings of disgust, anger or rage. So, the creator may take it down and try it again in an unaffected place, a place unpolluted by vitriol and self-attack. At this point without the setting of angst preset, people can see it for what it is and be aligned with the positivity in full. It is free to naturally accrete its full value, and the slandering system misses out massively. The value has been established. Should the threat be too great, and the cancerous speculation insist upon itself, humanity suffers a massive loss. We have seen such tragedies in the death of the writer of the Green Book, the destruction of alternate online universities, the destruction and defamation of alternative energy distribution designs, as well as the starvation, slander and medical neglect of some of the world’s best and brightest, including the infamous starvation of Nikola Tesla in a hotel. We may also see it in slanders of environments in general, perhaps in areas where prolific writers could establish numerous bodies of work and see healthy and proper funding and protection.

Does it have to be this way? No. It is on us to detect trends of the taxation and destruction of excellence in favor of the mediocre, so that ideas from which we can all benefit — efficient, wide-sweeping, and alternative energy and education distributions, public decision making, pluralized modular democracies, can see expedient funding that can still be checked for organic (not self-attacking speculative) repercussion.

When the sickness of the need for familiarity and superiority insists upon itself to the detriment of the solution in demand, we kill and imprison our cultural (and actual) doctors and then complain of no solution to our illness.

What we really mean is; we want to be the solution to the illness but sometimes we are not. Sometimes we are submitted, despite our pride, to our illness. We call for help, but can’t accept in so doing we relinquish what we imagined to be our position of full self-understanding. A proper doctor never humiliates you for that. They are generous with their exposition as well as their explanation.

We insist on, call and cry for the translations, clarifications, and distributions of our future, only to shatter their excellence to fund the ego of our past and present.

There is no place for humiliation and speculation in creativity. May we move with the future instead of squashing novelty into silence only to wonder why there is no guiding voice.