I recently saw a sweet documentary at IFFBoston about Fred Rogers. Say what you want about Mr. Rogers, but he was a bodhisattva or modern day saint. I didn’t appreciate it as a child, but I when I saw the clips of the unusual pacing of his show, it stunned me that he was able to get away with what he did.
Mr. Rogers would spend the first ten minutes just changing his shoes and putting on a sweater, feeding his fish, and dabbling around his television studio home while having a quiet conversation with you. It was as if he just wanted to allow for something extraordinary in the ordinary. His silence, presence, and being were given room to unfold within a child’s imagination and intuition.
Most children could probably see how genuine and decent he was. Even if you can’t articulate or confirm it at that age, you somehow knew it.
Turn the clock ahead thirty or forty years, and now we live in a world that requires us to quantitatively confirm it before we can know it. We’ve been subsumed under legal formalism, standardized tests, red tape, metrics, algorithms, social media, and augmented reality devices. Humanity has been outsourced!
It’s like an unhealthy cognitive dissonance has taken over, where we aren’t allowed to trust our imagination and intuition in a wholesome sense.
Have you ever noticed how much chattering goes on with the media these days trying to tell what is true, but just about all of it is useless noise? It’s as if they’re afraid to give us any space to think and contemplate for ourselves. It’s brought me to the point where I can barely watch any news shows these days. Now I’ve become one of those older people yearning for simpler times of less is more.
The Aphorist would say Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas. Just because you can say it more cleverly and more often, doesn’t make it more True. In the end, it just goes down and out like bad sushi.
Nassim Taleb bluntly talks about how his bullshit detector is way overly sensitive to the “intellectual professional” these days. Scientism has taken over good, old fashioned wisdom. We are no longer allowed to trust tradition or grandma's advise. Yet, “Replacing the "natural," that is age-old, processes that have survived trillions of high-dimensional stressors with something in a "peer-reviewed" journal that may not survive replication or statistical scrutiny is neither science nor good practice.”
So maybe we needed to leave simplicity behind to justify the salaries for these talking heads. And “when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.”
Mr. Rogers was not concerned with perception or sophistication. In fact, he was as uncool as you could get during those decades he broadcasted his low-fi show.
Yet, we got to see decency and goodness in a person. And today, we can't seem to point to that very often. Or we need some talking head or algorithm to tell us otherwise.