This blog post is about beauty, about excellence and uniqueness in their battle against efficiency, scale and functional Lego bricks.
Oil Painting by Adam Brooks
It’s about my hunger for systems that add value to society versus systems and environments that only suck value out of society.
It probably all started many years ago with Cradle to Cradle, the 2002 pivotal non-fiction book by German chemist Michael Braungart and U.S. architect William McDonough. I learned how reducing waste is not good enough, because at the end of reducing waste, there is still waste left. What if we would design systems that are regenerative, and add value and not waste at the end of the process cycle.
And of course there is my all time favorite architect-author Christopher Alexander with “The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems”, and Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, again about two world systems/views competing with each other.
I got my final kick when getting in to Brainpickings’ post on “Beauty, Quality, Poetry, and Integrity: Anaïs Nin Meets Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. (1947)”, with some great insights in the world of art and role of the artist.
It was about architecture that had been taken over by businessmen, and artists not being allowed to carry out their rich hunger for beauty. A bit like Evgeny Morosov’s fight against “solutionism”, where the world is taken over by VCs and commerce in stead of asking the real big questions related to ethos and quality of life.
“Strength was obvious in him, but sensitivity and imagination were in his drawings. A universe of lyrical beauty in total opposition to the sterile, monotonous, unimaginative ‘box’-buildings now seen all over the world.”
“In Lloyd’s work there was space, invention, poetry, a restrained and effective use of the romantic, surprises always in the forms, new and imaginative use of structural parts, rooms, windows, and materials. He has a gift for involvement in many-leveled lives, for the variations, caprices, and nuances necessary to the human spirit. Every stone, every roof-tile, every window, every texture or material was designed for the consistent development of his building, its environment, and designed to elevate the quality of people’s lives. Uniformity and monotony kill individuality, dull the senses.
Lloyd designed his work to reinforce individuality with poetry, beauty, and integrity. It was planned to create a more beautiful and satisfying human environment. Architecture as poetry. …
If he sounds like a moralist, it is because beauty, quality, and ethics are inseparable. Beauty and integrity. And for them one has to be willing to make sacrifices.
Many months ago, I had a chat about this with REXpedition friend Tom LaForge (Global Director, Human & Cultural Insights at The Coca-Cola Company), in 2011 an Innotribe speaker at Sibos Toronto. He inspired me with contextualizing our preferred system-1 as one of “drawing, flow and music”, where one “drinks from the fire hose of beauty”.
What if we would found a new collective of inspired thinkers, creators and sensemakers, the collective of QWAN (Quality Without A Name)? Surfing on the idea of “standing in your onlyness” as coined by Nilofer Merchant. A collective where we could connect with the other nodes, create another sort resonance with other nodes, a QWAN cohort as a way to connect with other quality nodes in tune with our true selves, allowing ourselves to to loose ourselves: in stead of “collective” we may want to call it the “connective”…
Loosing yourself…. Here is Brian Eno about loosing yourself:
“Sex, drugs, art, and religion—those are all activities in which you deliberately lose yourself. You stop being you and you let yourself become part of something else. You surrender control. I think surrendering is a great gift that human beings have. One of the experiences of art is relearning and rehearsing surrender properly. And one of the values perhaps of immersing yourself in very long periods of time is losing the sense of yourself as a single focus of the universe and seeing yourself as one small dot on this long line reaching out to the edges of time in each direction.“
Steering away from “in-group mentality”, and nurturing the ability to flow in/out other groups, and creating “permeable barriers” between the inner and outer self/shell referring to Jung’s dualism. Building lives in currencies that matter: respect, dignity, and kindness. With exchange rates and markets for these value currencies.
Using un-words like music, art, performance and poetry to access access the true self, buying into something experiential, loosing yourself.
In architecture it’s about the battle for beauty, against the “commonplace, shoddy, temporary movie-set houses around him were painful to see. He called them ‘cracker boxes,’ shabby, thin, motel-type homes for robots”
Marc Andreessen, well know for the phrase “Software is eating the world” also made a plea for saying he did not believe that robots will eat all the jobs”.
“Since our basic needs are taken care of, all human time, labor, energy, ambition, and goals reorient to the intangibles: the big questions, the deep needs. Human nature expresses itself fully, for the first time in history. Without physical need constraints, we will be whoever we want to be.”
“The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.”
“A planet of slackers you say. Not at all. Rather than nothing to do, we would have everything to do. Curiosity, artistic and scientific creativity have full rein resulting in new forms of status-seeking (!).”
“Imagine 6 billion or 10 billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be. The problem seems unlikely to be that we’ll get there too fast. The problem seems likely to be that we’ll get there too slow.”
All this is about – in my opinion a new quest for romanticism, also in business. I can’t wait for Tim Leberecht’s upcoming book “The Business Romantic, Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself”, scheduled for release in Jan 2015.
In the meantime, we have to do with his slide deck of his @MLove talk some time ago:
- Check out slide#12 about Romance, Un-Reason, Mystery, etc
- Slide #14 on Job Profile for Business Romantic
- Slide #18 on Suffer a Little, Keep the Mystique, Take the long way home
- And the fantastic slide #51 with the Traditional, Smart, Romantic matrix
And in slide#19 Tim quotes Aldous Huxley:
“But I don’t want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry,
I want real danger, I want freedom.
I want goodness.
I want sin.”
I wrote already in my Uberization blog post on 28 June:
- What if exponentially and scale are not relevant?
- What if the future model would not be based on exponentially, speed, scale, and efficiency?
- What if uniqueness becomes more important than functional Lego-bricks and efficiency?
- What if beauty becomes more important than function?
Like art, where the primary objective is to make something that is beautiful and resonates deeply at a non-cognitive, sub-conscious level and created happiness and fulfillment at a whole different intensity and quality. Where we want to resonate at an emotional level with each other, with a well-measured level of sharing, beyond legality and morality, but at a level of human intimacy.
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