Overcoming The Modern Mental Staleness

In my own personal view of myself, I regard myself as the student of about three or four quite significant and at one time world-famous individuals, although they are mostly not that much remembered anymore. Professor Munro Leaf from Harvard was a tutor of mine for a short while – he created the story behind the first Disney fullscreen colour cartoon: Ferdinand the bull. I got engineering lessons from some people I won't name although one was trained in Nazi-occupied Holland and I'd have to say, gave the impression to me that he was of two minds about what Nazism meant to him.

As far as psychology is concerned I am very proud to say I was something of a disciple of the late architect, psychologist, and polymath Paul Ritter, the man who laid the foundation stones of the original World Trade Center towers.

The one thing that I can distil from having known all of these people is a clear impression – as a result - that today's world possesses a kind of a 'spirit of deliberate mental staleness' and the consequences of this are bound to reflect in its buildings, architecture, social patterns and ultimately in the inevitability of widespread political, economic and social failure.

To build things worthy of the appellation of 'greatness,' is a lot lot harder than the government of Beijing knows, for instance, and it's not about 'doing more big buildings,' and takes a considerable amount of substance more than just the facile supplying of money which can of course be easily accomplished by drug cartels operating in Miami, as much as it can by the central planning committees typical of most contemporary governments.

To be great you have to know how to transgress the protective and self-defensive psychological umbra of other people, be able to get under their skin in a nice way, and make them much more human, rather than simply more 'televisual...' And really, beyond 'more human,' you also have to progress things and propel people into the future. You have to be avant garde.

One of the problems about blandness and intellectual staleness prevalent everywhere today is in the expression of the style and substance of today's woman. I agree, for example, with a few other bloggers about the recent interpretation of 'Irene Adler,' played by Lara Pulver, in the popular new television series 'Sherlock.' At first it seems she's clever – maybe cleverer than Sherlock himself - independent, sexual, and very bad, only for the whole thing to disappear under the idea that she is a puppet of Sherlock's nemesis, Moriarty.

A lot of what is passed off today as interesting, exotic, erotic, and attractive – is simply trite.

And following on from the last post I wrote about the Heineken beer commercial, why the superficiality when they could have extracted so much more from a legitimate mondo-ethnic source like: Bowyer-Yin's “Meet The Tiger.” Playing on the presumed superficiality of contemporary people is a mistake; yes the ad works, but it could have worked so much more. What are they all afraid of, these drips who have been hogging the commercial world for so long? And that includes Rupert Murdoch, who is an old fool. And all the politicians who kow-towed to him for so long are going to have to deal with people like me and the blogs that will go down into history standing in stark contrast to the self-important nonsense that has been written up till now about reactionaries like Reagan and Thatcher and Harry Lee – the nonsense that was mostly put up by themselves and their appointees funded by them to create the propaganda. Lee, for instance, purports in the Wikepedia entry about himself, that he was an interpreter for the Japanese, and no one says a word about it. Well, of course, you won't hear any complaints from the 50,000 ethnic Chinese (at least) who were genocidally massacred by bayonet and knife by the Japanese when they first entered Singapore. So much for the bullshit from Mr. Lee about how he was a great torch-bearer for ethnic Chinese interests.

Calvin J. Bear