The Drive of Progress in Man

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www.thedriveofprogress.com

�e Drive of Progress in Man

By Josh Valdes

�e Drive of Progress in Man is an adventure into that which is actually made free in a free market economy; the free market mind. Once transplanted into the imagination, this compact plot of diverse thought-forms will continue to grow in your brain, well after the pages are laid to rest. �e rare individuals who are extraordinary host to �e Drive of Progress characterize humanity as the most powerful species of life yet to arise on Earth. �e insights gained by this exploration apply directly to a systematic weak-point in our education system; that is the forced memorization, and intellectual conformity which bias the learning process against the most creative and independent thinkers; people with an exceptional drive to advance the status quo. ADHD and Dyslexia are two major forces in the development of such minds, they force �e Drive of Progress from its slumber by necessity.

The Drive of Progress in Man

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Josh Valdes---------------

The Drive of Progress in Man -

ADHD and Dyslexia in Context


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Copyright 2008 Josh Valdes

Layout and Cover by: Eric Gang

ISBN: 1-4196-9428-6



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Dedication

This book is dedicated to my ancestors; whose wisdom both conscious and unconscious, drove this life form through time, by its daring successes, to live today as the most powerful species ever to enjoy Earth. And to all those alive today who appreciate the genius of our ancestors, to become not fish or mouse or tree or even dog, but MAN yet growing. If any human today feels inferior to any other that lives or has lived, it is only the drive of progress lying down in them; our standing power is no lucky accident.


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Dedication

Warning

Capitalism Merely Allows Progress

Blindspot

The Fruit Tree

Let Me Give You a Hand

The Beast in Question

Bag It and Tag It

The Eagle Spirit

Sources by Age:

3

9

15

19

27

31

45

67

89

95

Places To Rest


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0

Warning

This book is a lean Bull, and thus may be fully

comprehended only when the imagination of the reader

moves like the thin end of a whip on which the eyes

are handle. But fear not, the flow is that of an ancient

river on sandstone below the cliff-side layers of history.

Instant understanding of every sentence is not necessary

to remain out of prison; trust that all will become clear

as you read further.

Just as the writer found a necessity to question

the current education system, the resultant thought

process of this book raises uncertainties along its

twisting flow into your mind. It must be clear that this

story is to be rafted down for its natural beauty, and that

its level of honesty is a result of prolific erosion.

Off the most concrete section of river-bed on our

journey falls a sprinkle of how to actually improve the

development process we are all subject to as modern


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young humans. This process itself is very young to

humanity, and so very susceptible to advancement.

Advancement however must be undertaken with

greatness of care, in proportion to the importance of

education to human happiness and social structure.

Economic virility is dependent on the development of

young minds capable of making it happen.

Because educational process is so essential, its

mutation rate and evolution are naturally slow. The

primary danger of this slow change stems from the fact

that the economic environment has been accelerating

its own rate of change. This does not call for reckless

attempts to modify teaching and testing methods, but

rather careful examination of the actual symptoms of the

expanding fissure between desired result and the effects

of methods used.

The importance of educational practice

elevates its resistance to change. This resistance to

change naturally increases the mass of conflicting

results needed to throw doubt on the theory behind

the practice. When doubt of any theory becomes

substantial enough, only then will progress happen. To

more accurately fit how something is understood to the

observable details of its operation confers progress. We

are talking about when the earth changes, from flat with

edges to be sailed off, to round; suddenly satellites can

be given orbit.

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Warning

A heavy theory tends to force the outside world

to its structure, whereas progress happens when theory

is lifted to expose the worms and pill-bugs crawling

underneath it. The picture painted across these pages

is directly inspired by twenty years experience climbing

rigid cliffs along a crack in educational systematics; I

am an ant under the rock. Follow this, my chemical

trail, to a great source of food so that our colony may

grow more wondrous and powerful. The spread of

human knowledge has grown far and wide to wrap its

thick Internet-tentacles around the globe. We may eat

from this vast food source to contentment, and it in turn

subsists on our thoughts strung together by sunlight and

lightning.

The practice of medicating smart students to

improve grades is an adjustment of reality to fit theory.

This book presents an adjustment to be applied to

theory, so for practice to more effectively fit educational

reality. Case in point; ‘I can’t pay attention in class, but

can easily read an interesting non-fiction book all day’.

But before a solution can be presented, the

problem itself must be made clear; that is the first

helping of this meal. Reader, and remember this

is a high distinction, as you paddle down this river

make sure to notice the scenery of your own memory,

imagination, and feelings as they come to view and

pass. These are the real content of the text, and any


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understanding we share is built of our humanity in

common. Quotation of highly regarded others is used

here to root story growth in the cave-paintings of human

historical experience. The pace of flow is swift so to not

waste reader time; understanding that appreciation of

the most sublime features can be got by pulling off onto

a river bank to rest and contemplate.

This river of thought is a prototype of how to

dive directly into the source of a problem in search of

solid ground for improvement. Down here we find

improvement of academic scores to be too infirm a basis

on which to improve education process itself; this water

is too cloudy.This problem of students whose attention

cannot be sufficiently held to academic study cannot be

solved by observing behavior, we must actually crawl in

and see through their eyes and be tied to their whipping

post. Allow yourself to be safely swept through the dark

underbelly of human progress to feel the heat that drives

it.

This must be clear, that human progress is

driven by the suffering and empathy of individuals; as a

response to make life easier. On this base let me stand

naked and proclaim ‘this story is a direct response to

the specific suffering of my experience in a full course of

educational treatment’. The primary goal of this effort is

thus to relive the suffering of others tied to my post, and

there are millions in the United States alone. This is to

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Warning

show those like me why they are being whipped, while

making clear to everyone else that it hurts and more

fruitful ways are possible. The most flowering growth

of this process extends understanding of overall human

nature.

External observation has hereto produced only

symptomatic treatments, and as these become more

effective they will further obscure the underlying cause.

The symptoms include boredom, resistance to authority,

inattention, daydreaming, hyperactivity, sleeping in

class, misbehavior in class, unfinished assignments,

poor test scores, and the anxiety and despair these

can cause in young people. The underlying cause is a

fundamental property of human nature and the subject

of this study.

This style of poetic non-fiction directly

demonstrates the nature of mind also described in its

content; the subject of study reflected upon itself. That

is to draw a box of crayons using those crayons being

drawn. Not only to show what crayons look like, but also

how they draw; a broadband channel.

So go on fearless reader, allow me to penetrate

you and plant seeds.


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1


“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill

is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from

people of ill will” -MLK Jr.

This is a story about a world which thrives largely

unseen around us. Neither microscopic nor overtly

hidden, rather veiled by a peripheral blindspot of the

majority mind. From this mysterious well springs

gushes of fresh brain pattern. I come to your attention

to represent a powerful and oppressed minority

population which exudes a profound influence on

the accelerating development of human civilization.

Influenced in thought and action more or less by

inner and outer forces are the individual humans.

The innermost of them is our flavor of discourse this

evening.


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We have this problem of young students bored

of studies, desk locked and paper faced, who must

be entertained with brain stimulants. Educational

methods in practice K-16 are geared to churn greatest

achievement from those most predisposed to think act

and dress in drove fashion, and inverse to the degree

which they are compelled to explore and experiment.

Raise your right hand if you feel science and math

are primarily systematic endeavors. Herein lies an

important distinction because, hand waving or not, the

conception which is currently co-activated with the

motor region just a little forward and to the left of center

top of your head is what we are working on here. Please

allow us to conjecture that learning styles vary across

several or more dimensions, but the objective result

among all is same on the level of creating, destroying,

and modifying the reactive properties of neuron to

neuron connections; the adaptive development of

information handling structures.

Synaptogenesis is the medium with which the

teacher and learner practice their art. Cocurrent to

this solvent fact is the floating question of ‘what do we

fill our minds with, and why?’. As the cerebral cortex

continues enfold all realms of human affair, our varieties

of response to the aforementioned question cry out for

sincere attention.

Factor interest is primary to depth of

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understanding for given subject, while degree of

this relationship is variable across the spectrum of

individual propensity to conform to the drove. How

physically able are you to direct your thought and

action by overt extrinsic command? There is a tinge of

discomfort associated with this; let us make it relevant

by asking ‘what effect does this feeling have on thought

and behavior?’. It has a slight effect of arousal in flavor

of either fight or flight. In case of flight it expresses as

a hit of shy withdraw, whereas in fight tastes more like

enthusiasm, possibly flanked by a supportive thought

to justify the abnormal behavior. This enthusiasm

and stray thought is the learned coping behavior of

hyperactivity we see in a minority segment of the

population. I would also like to propose that the

function that ensures fight side of the response tree is

also intimately involved with the ability to conjure a

state of hyperfocus.

Out of line behaviors serve to supply the much

needed arousal in those strange few who chill above

the arctic circle of classroom experience; we learn to

keep warm. This serves the flip side role of developing

the hyperfocus skill. The advanced development of this

skill is essential in those who exhibit propensity to it, as

hyperfocus is a significant benefit feature in the trade-off

package endowed to a minority population of minds.

Comprehension of the dynamics of minority


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features is important to those who exhibit such

features, as well as to those who do not and thus require

abstracted framework on which to appreciate behavior

they operate no subjective experience of. For those who

for example hyperfocus, understanding is important

for cultivation and defense. For those in the dark,

structured explanation can ease intellectual prejudice

and their experience with discordant elements as they

can be integrated into less disruptive channels.

Regular brain stimulant administration of the

sort that temporarily inhibits dopamine reuptake in the

prefrontal cortex, such as Ritalin and Adderall, suppress

the development of hyperfocus. This distinction is

contrasted to caffeine which actually assists in the

cultivation of this important skill, in part by reducing

inhibition of the dopamine release system while forcing

little or no direct effect on dopamine reuptake. This is in

major part why ‘hard’ stimulants are prescribed instead

of our fuzzy cuddle buddy caffeine. Caffeine won’t

normalize a minority like amphetamines so effectively

tend to.

I here risk that the axis of human freedom turns

on point very near the eye of the storm this story rides in.

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2

Blindspot

There is a blindspot in the majority of educated

minds that would quickly brush off the notion of

Albert Einstein that “the only thing that interferes

with my learning is my education.” It does not soak

in when applied to them because for a majority of

minds education has been reasonably effective. Al was

clearly out of bounds for much of the game. It must

be clear that he was no Lance Armstrong who simply

can ride harder than the average bear. While other

kids were following the leader around the chalkboard,

little Albert was climbing the tree out the window. Not

more, rather different as he said in apparent humility

“but my intellectual development was retarded, as a

result of which I began to wonder about space and time

only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could

go deeper into the problem than a child with normal

abilities.”


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Clearly Albert Einstein was not retarded in the

popular culture sense... so what is this statement?

I wonder if we can retard our thought process for

long enough to slip deeper into him. The affect of

wonder here draws blood for the great mind. Dyslexic

billionaire Richard Branson once commented on his

poor academic performance “if I’m not interested in

something I can’t grasp it.” This interest of wonder is no

artifact insignificant, for the great mind is dependent on

flood from this wellspring for its movement. Leonardo

Da Vinci wrote “He who can go to the fountain does not

go to the water jar.” The virtue of interest is prime mover

of the powerful mind whereas commonly thought is

best yoked to the neck of animal which can be driven

straight.

Charles Darwin shows sign of intrinsic direction

as a letter from his sister concerns “I have message from

papa to give you, which I am afraid you won’t like: he

desires me to say that he thinks your plan of picking

and choosing what lectures you like to attend not at all

a good one;... as you cannot have enough information

to know what may be of use to you, it is quite necessary

for you to bear with a good deal of stupid and dry

work... if you do not discontinue your present indulgent

way, your course of study will be utterly useless.” This

at Cambridge of all places. What we are to capture

here is no temporary myopia of a period but a general

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Blindspot

aversion of the eye as result from intelligent majority

misunderstanding of a minority phenomenon. No

majority of Cambridge grads could say as Darwin “I

consider that all I have learnt of any value has been self

taught.”

Was the statement of Rainer Maria Rilke “The

future enters into us in order to transform itself long

before it happens” mere poetic appeal to fantastic

sentiment? Not so in the case of Mr. Darwin, and I

propose commonly across intrinsically motivated free

spirits the world over. This void of misunderstanding

publicly expressed in Darwin and later Einstein

anxiously waits for illumination even today as the dire

for truly unique perspective grows lush.

At glance Emerson blinked “to be different is

to be misunderstood”, and snatched a fundamental

property of human social process between his lashes.

The lashes of misunderstanding are ever present and

undue burden to the chocolate chips in our half baked

society; undue in greatest savagery to the young. Albert

Einstein was fortunate enough to be disposed of the

sentiment “I live in that solitude which is painful

in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” As

their peers cook from doughy childhood to form a

comparably homogeneous crust burnt in some places,

our little chocolate chips only become more fluid and

delicious.


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Our bittersweet older brother Niccolo

Machiavelli ventured to extrapolate that “owing to the

envy inherent in man’s nature it has always been no

less dangerous to discover new ways and methods than

to set off in search of new seas and unknown lands

because the generality of mankind are much more ready

to belittle than to praise another’s actions.” Niccolo saw

the lashes of misunderstanding given him through the

monocle of envy. Envy is not the only base outgrowth

to shade eyes from strange new fruit which has yet to

be blended into common sensibilities. Any sentiment

that directs attention away from the fruit itself will do,

and these are heavily represented by the ‘antisocial’

emotional reactions. What is antisocial in this sense

can be expressed by a group who share a common

facet of worldview, in reaction to another. This is the

case we are playing with here of commonly ignorance

to uncommonly independent minds. Uncommon

significantly as result of the strong social forces which

ally against its continued expression.

The mental barriers to independent thought

which must be overcome by great individual effort

tend to exclude all but those few who are unable to act

otherwise. In part this is why traits such as ADHD and

dyslexia encourage dissatisfaction with and divergence

from thought and behavior considered within the range

of normal in the society which they operate. That which

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Blindspot

Chuck Darwin experienced as ‘stupid and dry work’ at

Cambridge was accurately tasted by his hungry growing

mind as devoid of the nutriment necessary for optimal

growth. This is no minor inconvenience to be brushed

off as we wade over our heads into the information age.

As sophisticated taste in food opposes the

obesity of empty calories, so too for feeding the mind.

The housecat raised on tender canned food will

often refuse to eat if downgraded to dry. The odd few

minds which cannot be sustained on mass produced

dry chunk information and milked for standardized

responses standing corralled in factory farms are the

uranium of the information age. Occasionally a few

collect themselves enough, against the social forces that

blindly dilute them, to achieve a critical mass. Carl Jung

noticed that “Resistance to the organized mass can be

effected only by the man who is as well organized in

his individuality as the mass itself.” Few circumstances

accidentally favor, while most species of exotic fruit

bearer are left out to dry and rot.

We may forgive the original Luddites shortage of

hindsight in opposing technological development, but

today the unstopability of human mental and material

progress imposes itself like spring. In the midst of April

showers, Albert Einstein spit out the hard-shelled pit

of his own fruit: “the problems that exist in the world

today cannot be solved at the level of thinking that


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created them.” Al didn’t spit this seed into the trash as

a despaired gesture of its inedibility, he rather spread it

across the world as printed word so that it may chance

upon fertile soils, or even alert gardeners. I pose no

dispute that the man spoke from extensive personal

experience with the distinction ‘level of thinking’, and

furthermore acclimated to the heights of scientific rigor

to sharply state ‘cannot be solved’.

Einstein’s hard shelled pit is a confident gesture

of guidance. It must be clear that Einstein’s ‘level of

thinking’ is no formalized philosophical concept to be

debated as layers of increasing abstraction stacked into

great pyramids aligned to distant points of light. It arose

from the experience of social intercourse with widely

variant levels of superficial worldview he encountered

in the wild; the pettiness of that which a mind may

be concerned with. This of course is all relative and a

taste to be developed by exposure, but go find the local

racist to refresh your drink. Albert, blessed with a high

contrast view of the effects of different levels of thought

in his social environment, took a sharp point to the

persistent blindspot we herein work to augment.

Listen, the symptoms suppressed by sit still and

listen drugs are the action of a highly sophisticated

biological system whose activity is as mysterious and

essential to the survival of our species as REM sleep. The

window of time to stall is constricting; fight and we have

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Blindspot

a good chance, flight and death or worse is the fate of the

human brain experiment. To be clear, flight is the soon

to arise pharmacopoeia of sophisticated suppressants.

To fight is to advance the art of mind cultivation from

the current level of slash and burn monoculture to forest

husbandry; this generation.


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3

The Fruit Tree

Raise your hand if you know how to make an

apple. Your mind is too simple, go make friends with

an apple tree instead. How many years from sapling to

fruit? Alright, now plant a seed nature unknown; what is

it? Here I give you a handful... some bear signs familiar,

others more exotic. First we must learn the signs of the

young fruit tree before it bears.

You will find the behavior of the fruit tree

to be more complex than that of the vegetable;

less predictable and significantly more resistant to

behavioral habit. Closely related is a supernormal

resistance to the imposition of rules. This trait is

a reaction to be discovered by the organism and

expression at least slightly delayed. This is an important

factor to the production of nutritious fruit, and a fully

developed specimen cannot be commanded.

Grocery store tomatoes are poor souls, have you

tasted my grandfather’s garden in august? He has good

soil, and they impeccable timing; the old man dare not


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tell them what to do or when.

Another sight to be held is imitation. Does the

seedling in question behave as the grains and other

annuals? The fruit tree does not grow fast and straight

as the corn stalk, and the crooked broadside growth

of its branches will make for sweeter climbing in

maturity. The need for distance from others will only be

comprehended as this space begins to fill, and our tree

is closer to more by virtue of circumference. To restrain

lateral branching in hope of forcing upward growth

is a common mistake of those inexperienced with

the deciduous varieties of neuroculture; this will only

cripple full development.

You cannot expect your fruit trees to grow at the

same rate as the annual crops, and to expect them to

do so will only frustrate the process. Be assured that

their strength later in development will far exceed that

of the more frantic varieties which trade off density for

immediate height. After they cease to bear fruit in old

age they will be exceptionally gratifying to sit under.

To be clear, those who display abnormal

disregard for common fashion, rule, and behavior do

so because they must. This is no mere side effect of

the unique mind, rather an integral component of its

development, and continued operation which is itself

development. The less imitative among us can be

identified by their strange behavior.

The immensely limited activity of one brain is

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The Fruit Tree

divided between the miraculous skill of imitation and

the generation of novelties. Those sufficiently bent to

novelties too quickly discover the spring to pursue the

often stale bottle. Ahhhh to develop a taste for the fresh

undiluted, this is the drive of greatness as sexual desire

and its ecstatic satisfaction is the drive to baby making.

Virgins who subsist on pornography are sure to savor

by flavor and tradition, while the fellow creator seeks

nutriment and drinks deeper.

From this carnal drive to novelty an abnormal

depth of processing can develop. The profoundly thirsty

spirit learns to dig more holes and deeper, an elephant

among dogs lapping at shallow pools. Physics Nobel

laureate Robert Laughlin recalls that two time Nobel

acceptor John Bardeen “was notorious for speaking

slowly even when answering the simplest of questions

- presumably because he was thinking deeply about

the possible answers to ‘how are you?’ and all their

implications.” Practical Frank reacts through his pocket-

phone ‘good’ to this standard greeting in polite fashion,

ambivalent to the details of its function.

The inventor of the transistor parched enough

to suck juice from a simple greeting; how weird.

This odd divergence only superficially resembles

psychopathology. The common sentiment of a fine line

between genius and insanity is base and spawn of fear

to the unknown. Genius and insanity relate only in that

they are abnormal and thus misunderstood, the likeness


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ends there and is confined to those accustomed to drink

with label and high fructose corn syrup.

Benoit Mandelbrot, drunk at the fountain with

visions of fractal geometry taunts “at first blush, such

misbehavior looks most bizarre and even terrifying,

but a careful reexamination shows it to be quite

acceptable..., as long as one is willing to use new

methods of thought.”

Alright class, everyone write on a scrap piece

of paper a unique response to the everyday question

‘how are you’. Teacher, teacher, ooh, ooh, ooh... What

is it this time Disruptive Daydreamer?... We did this in

creativity class with Dr. Obscure-Source last semester,

can I give a better question to question?... Just do the

assignment D.D.; one small step for a teacher - one giant

lesson for Disruptive Daydreamer. It will likely take D.D.

many years to gather enough of these pieces to get the

picture, and many more to form a firm confidence that

it is no lone fantasy, but rather fundamental to human

nature. The firm ten-fingered grasp of this picture is part

of the delicious aftertaste of solitude Einstein found in

maturity.

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4


Let us first establish that the subjects here on

our table are strongly moved by the invisible hand of

interest. Ahhh, and who ever could fail to suspect a left

hand to compliment the right Adam Smith so fruitfully

blessed. How many arms have been twisted, by teachers

holding the blank slate, to use the common hand?

In kindergarten I was told something along the

lines of ‘no, we write with our other hand’. This is all it

took for a young chalkboard to do the right thing; under

a minute oversize pencil in grip.

This once common practice of enforced right

hand preference has subsided to a more subtle form.

Just as the invisible right hand tends to brutalize the

natural environment due to disregard of effects not

immediately relevant in favor of more proximal gain, so

too for the developing mind. The garden untended by

consistent habits trends to reduced production, whereas


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the great rainforest of Amazon has learned to sustain its

soil and rainfall, to degenerate under habits necessary to

the garden. The significance of our task is to encourage

complex rainforest-like minds to develop where they

may and to train various gardeners of the rest.

Let us be direct that the habits most conducive to

productive citizenry in all but the least imitative persons

are detrimental to our more complex subjects. Efforts to

adhere to the herd amount to a somewhat limp dragging

wherein the mouth collects bullshit. A ferocious

sensitivity to bullshit is a sign of the well developed

creator, and is a sophisticated tool hard won in the

softening sea of confidently ignorant actors. Humans

value cohesion for its own sake, and an astute sense for

bullshit is in opposition to some of its promoting factors.

It’s important to remember that wide variation across

this spectrum is essential and natural to human social

structure; the auto-defrost freezer.

The human condition is such that the cooling

system knows its job, but gets scared when the

defroster kicks on. The current western-developed

reaction is such that chill pills are given the defroster

under a limited view that they too must help with the

cooling process. Now that progress is prime directive,

defroster becomes uranium fission rods and the rest

is water to channel the heat for production. Prevent

meltdown, but don’t stop the reaction altogether people.

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Albert Einstein felt this strongly enough to write “for

everything that is really great and inspiring is created

by the individual who can labor in freedom, restriction

is justified only in so far as it may be needed for the

security of existence.”

The necessity of maximal freedom to the great

and inspiring mind is in no danger of overstatement;

this fact is hard for the common mind to appreciate.

Martin Luther King Junior established that “we know

through painful experience that freedom is never

voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded

by the oppressed.” This oppression is more subtle than

outward forms based on religion or skin color.

Henry Poincaré sensed that “discipline imposes

silence upon a too sensitive self-esteem.” Self esteem is

very sensitive in those divergent spirits human progress

depends on, at least in wait of hard social justification

for their aberrant behavior such as money and fame.

Fruits come into the picture, and true confidence may

arise when others make wine of them. On fruit Einstein

stressed that “without such freedom there would

have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton,

no Faraday, no Pasteur, and no Lister. There would be

no comfortable houses for the mass of the people, no

railway, no wireless, no protection against epidemics,

no cheap books, no culture, and no enjoyment of art

for all... It is only men who are free, who create the


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inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns

make life worth while.”

The discipline which is effective in developing

the normal majority tends to ‘impose silence’ on our

minority of strange creatives, most harshly for the young.

The economic invisible hand pushes for the immediate

returns of imitation in neglect of the left hand of interest.

Interest brings greater return in the life of free spirits. At

issue here is the gap in mind between the known and

the seen; conventional discipline imposes silence in this

gap. Look at something familiar, then hold on for long

enough to get the feeling that you don’t know everything

about it. This will open a crack which may fill with

unanticipated observations, both external as sensory

details and internally as unanticipated thoughts. These

unanticipated novelties, which arise in the fissure or

canyon between the concrete observed and the concrete

known, stimulate interest.

Less motivated by external reward and

punishment, our divergent trickles can be brought to

torrent by the more internal punishment and reward

of boredom and interest. The system of reward and

punishment most strongly driving the individual

nervous system is primary factor to the educational

methods which will prove effective.

Let us sweep this through the light of intellectual

history to see a flash of each exposed face. “Nothing

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is more certain than that all improvement in human

affairs is without exception the work of discontented

characters”, John Stuart Mill. “I was discovering that

most high-powered minds do not daily generate new

ideas. Their brains mostly lie idle until the input of one

or more new facts stimulates their neurons to resolve

the conundrums that stump them”, James Watson.

“One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten

the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and

intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little

against one”, Sigmund Freud. These three statements,

however generalized in writing, are based on the

personal experience of individuals heavily biased by the

internal dynamic of interest and boredom.

The terms invisible right and left hands are not

meant to be extrapolated into the popular concept of

left and right brain ‘dominant’ people or any specific

anatomical notions. Rather this is a guiding principal

reflected parallel and inside out of the outward guiding

force of economic manpower direction. It must be clear

that though everyone is affected by both hands, they

operate in sharp opposition. Physics Nobel laureate

Robert Laughlin stressed “the truth is that sometimes

the imperative to focus fails, and there is absolutely

nothing anybody can do about it. The impulse to live

in creative freedom is powerful within all of us, and a

handful of people wind up succumbing to it despite the


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warnings.” Despite the fearful warnings of right handed

conformity, only vaguely aware of the fruits. Focus

does not fail, but rather fails to be directed by monetary

concerns. Though Laughlin describes this as the “brainy

cousin of drug abuse or teenage suicide”, he salivates for

its jelly.

In like spirit to Einstein, Laughlin swoons

“what is certain is that it is the true source of art,

scientific discovery that counts, and the powerful drive

to innovate characteristic of modern civilization.”

Powerful as these claims may seem, disregard for the

minority they most tightly apply to is a great cause of

real inefficiency and suffering. My dog caught between

a bowl of food and a rabbit first will chase the rabbit,

to return only after the prey escapes. The prey escapes

because my dog is secured to bulk food and predatory

skill development has been retarded.

It must be distilled water; no, world war, obesity,

poverty, substance abuse, weapon of mass destruction

clear that the development of human minds of

disproportionate potential to improve the conditions

of human existence are currently being actively

retarded. And further that this long standing condition

is supported by pervasive ignorance. In 1947 C.S. Lewis

must have whispered “we continue to clamor for those

very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can

hardly open a periodical without coming across the

- 37 -


statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’,

or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or creativity.” Look for it

in the magazine rack of your nearest bookstore, I get it in

the mail every month.

This problem can not be solved by imitation; as

if a life size model airstrip will magically bring supplies

from a developed nation, or even that enough food for

everyone will solve hunger. Have you heard the World

Health Organization report that in 2006 there were one

billion overweight humans and only eight hundred

million starving? H.G. Wells was sloppy to write “human

history becomes more and more a race between

education and catastrophe.” Not speed, rather form is

the important factor here.

C.S. Lewis reminds that “the task of the modern

educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate

deserts.” The farm field too will benefit from irrigation,

but to the rainforest this is absurd; it need only

protection from farmers and lumberjacks. The right and

left hands engage in a tug-of-war inside the individual

throughout life. This is healthy exercise, but much more

often than not the left hand is told to loose on command

and throw the fight. I am confident to speculate that

this force is a major cause for the swelling epidemic of

depression, which is no illusion of increased reporting.

The pull contest between interest and money,

curiosity and security, sways across hours, weeks,


- 38 -

decades, and lives. The pull of interest tends to take

longer to establish dominance than that of money. This

is in part due to the primal and contemporary social

forces aligned against it. External demand of discipline

and industry are often mere impediments to powerful

thought. This is why Laughlin wrote “good theoretical

physics is actually more like art than engineering and

is similarly difficult to summon up on demand.” E.O.

Wilson expands that “the best of science doesn’t consist

of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks

make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a

more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter’s

mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors

and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen.

To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought.”

Ahhh, yes the hunter, now we’re on to something, and

‘difficult to summon up on demand’.

On to summon, Laughlin proceeds “the physical

idea precedes the mathematics, and the act of writing

it down as a simple equation is like capturing a song or

a poem.” Since the higher process can’t be forced, but

rather must be fed, education focuses on something that

can be forced, imitation.

Let it be evident that a test which can be cheated

on is an assessment of imitation. Imitation is surely no

devil, but the resort to it as a reasonable demand is why

Laughlin emphasized “like many great scientists, Galileo

- 39 -


was a rebellious individual. He had left university

without a degree in order to pursue his own intellectual

agenda.” I suspect many to assume Galileo as dropout

to be contextual to the scientifically primitive time of

his life. This is misconception, the blindspot persists

and cannot simply be expected to resolve on its own like

slavery and smallpox.

Imitation is no devil, but he who forces it does

his work; raise your hand if you believe in the virtue of

repressive government. The effort required to repress

an intellectual interest is greater than the force of that

interest. Being one body, the right and left hands not

only tug for position, they also share a power source.

As interest gains power money loses it, as the brain has

only so much energy at its disposal.

The trend of education is to condition the

student to the direction of the invisible right hand.

Not only the advanced development of imitation, but

also the repression of individual interest and resultant

retardation of creativity serve this end. Adults do not

have to become less creative with age, its development

is actively retarded by the overemphasis of imitative

behavior inherent to human social tendencies. As a

leading follower of interest, Alan Greenspan cheers

“I was seventy-three, true, but I saw no diminution of

my creativity, or of my ability to handle mathematical

relationships, or of my apatite for work - changes


- 40 -

that would have made me hang up my spurs.” It is

common knowledge that creativity cannot be forced in

everyone, and so it is not essential to academic success.

Unfortunately the fact that imitation cannot be forced in

everyone is neglected, to the acute detriment of many

intelligent people and so society as a whole.

The less imitative one tends to be, the more

painfully imitation is experienced as a waste of precious

developmental effort, poorly compensated by transient

grades and money. For the people of the right hand,

physical security and material goods are an end in

themselves, for the left handers mere means with which

to continue their work here on earth.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander

“suggested that culture is kept ‘on track’ by the interests

of individuals, and not by the interests of populations

or species except in the case that the interests of the

individuals comprising them are shared.” The interests

of individuals keep culture on track whereas the

motivating factor of money more often than not directs

activity away from the interest of the individual being

paid; traveling for business or pleasure sir, are you

reading that book for a class? The customer is always

right, did I mention popular vote? Who wants to buy

mine?

The world economies are trending toward

diversification and globalization as a result of increasing

- 41 -


efficiencies conferred by advancement of technological

capability. This accelerating trend of reduced

dependence on easily systemized human mental and

physical labor will only continue, as it constitutes

relief of human sufferings. This is important because

money tends to be compensation for suffering, whereas

personal interest tends to the reduction of suffering,

when present, which is essentially always.

Who is so lucky to make a living by doing

what they enjoy, is a fortunate being indeed. Erwin

Schrödinger winced “the machine must take over

the toil for which man is too good.” The reduction

of suffering is the prime directive of ideal human

progress, we have reproduction down pat and licked;

humans? How many do you want sir? I’ll get right on

it. Friedrich Nietzsche felt “creating - that is the great

salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for

the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed and

much transformation.” We have plenty of suffering, the

limiting reagent in the synthesis of relief is tolerance

for transformation. Word on the street is that more

people kill themselves than die from HIV in the world.

SSRI antidepressants are thought to elicit their effect by

increasing development of new neurological structures,

novelty also does this.

Nietzsche is among those unserved by education

and laments “what is the task of all higher education?


- 42 -

- To turn a man into a machine. - By what means? - He

has to learn how to feel bored. - How is that achieved?

- Through the concept of duty.” Einstein gives highlight

to this by reflecting “education is that which remains, if

one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” The

economic value of duty is sinking as the demand for

creativity balloons, if something reverses this trend it is

most surely unwanted calamity. Academic learning is

forced by measure, but creativity is outside the force-

measure dynamic, especially in its earlier stages of

development. This is largely why adoption remains

stagnant, it requires terrifying new patterns of thought.

Has the shortfall of education as we know it been

made clear yet? Laughlin smacks his medal “even this

room is teeming with things we do not understand.

Only people whose common sense has been impaired

by too much education cannot see it. The idea that

the struggle to understand the natural world has come

to an end is not only wrong, it is ludicrously wrong.”

To walk around the structure, known for competing

with the public funded Human Genome Project, Craig

Venter recounts “after facing death in Vietnam, I was not

afraid to take risks, that’s not typical of scientists. It’s a

group that follows much more than it leads.” Scientists

follow more than they lead because the education

process which conditions their growth is as intense as

schooling gets, and places excruciating demands on

- 43 -


the development of imitation. This allows less residual

effort that might have gone to creative development, and

filters out intelligent but highly creative individuals.

Let it be clear that some people express a more

vigorous creative drive than they are able to continually

suppress, and that in grades K-16, creativity is a

handicap. This has to change, and when it does a great

release of human energies will be made available which

were before lost to friction. Well, that’s a beautiful idea,

but what can we do about it? First we will explore the

nature of the beast.


- 44 -

- 45 -

5

The Beast in Question

My fellow humans, we have fully tamed our

food source, everything you need to remain physically

healthy can be grown with reasonable certainty.

Any issues you may have are to be forwarded to the

department of logistics. The department of food has

effectively eliminated its need for hunters and gatherers,

and has enabled us to graze at leisure. Unfortunately

the department of teaching now operates under the

idea that what works for our bodies, should work for our

minds.

I have in my hand a report from the department

of advancement, signed by the director of logistics

and several other departments, that the agricultural

paradigm of education is grossly less effective than it

needs to be. Though a good number of easily herded

minds are necessary to their represented organizations,

these like food are available in excess.


- 46 -

The report states that: ‘every single department

which reports to the department of advancement

represents one or more organizations in need of more

hunters and gatherers; people able to find, stalk,

retrieve, and make efficient use of things they don’t

already know about. They also report that though the

hunters pose no real threat to the grazers, the heard

tends to chase our hunters away in fear.

The department of advancement hereby requests

that the department of teaching foster the development

of as many hunters and gatherers as possible.

Furthermore, it is requested that the hunters learn to be

sensitive to the deep rooted fears lurking within grazers,

while making the grazers as familiar as possible with the

hunter for the objective of quelling this fear.

This committee has gone out on an adventure

and returns with the collection below to assist your

efforts: First and foremost, the practice of drugging your

subjects naturally disinclined to graze, so to keep them

in the field, is in opposition the needs of our civilization

and the principals held by this committee. The reason

being, their predatory instincts, which we herein aim to

develop, must be encouraged. For this to happen, the

field must be a place for them to exhibit and distribute

what they have brought back from their adventures.

The grazers will gain greatly from this

supplementation; both in strength, and appreciation for

- 47 -

The Beast In Question

the adventurers, who are currently tolerated at best. The

developing mind cannot continually feed on the same

kinds of knowledge and continue to grow as can the

body of food. New knowledge must always be hunted

and gathered for our advancement, simple planting of

old seeds is not enough. Learning to eat the catch of

the adventurers is not sufficient to develop the actual

hunting and gathering skills, though it can wet the

mouth.

When the hunter-gatherer is bored, their time

and development potential is being wasted; no matter

how sweet the grass today they want flesh and fruit. You

may see them inside the fence, playing with their feed

as if it were animate; just as important as what they eat

is how they get it. Those accustomed to the field tend

to say things like ‘go get us a bag of rabbits’, with little

understanding of the wild beyond the fence. Sometimes

older grazers will even demand a specific catch like

rabbit. This is inefficient, and may prevent the retrieval

of other substance such as deer or fruit. To pass up

the chance to bring back to the field something truly

amazing, because mundane lettuce was asked for, is

stressful to the explorer and weakens their enthusiasm

in ways the grazer cannot understand. Much of this

misunderstanding comes from the grazer’s common

experience of low diversity, high yield eating, wherein

one grazer can reasonably be asked to gather a large


- 48 -

bag of grass. Nothing in the field poses the risk of being

more valuable to the group than the already known

material.

The hunter and gatherer of ‘new ways and means’

values mind, whereas the grazer if given choice will

take the barn and tractor. This can be crudely distilled

to a preference for that which sustains the individual.

Neither subspecies is any more or less noble, each

elevates the halo of importance over their own life. We

tend to see the value in other ways of life as we become

aware of the limits in our own. This contributes to the

suffering which young hunters and gatherers are given

to bear as a natural minority.

Of course hunters and gatherers learn by

imitation, but the dynamic is significantly different

from that of the grazer. The growing hunter-gatherer

gains little beyond distaste from beef stew and fruit

pie; they need bones to tear from muscle and peel and

seed to pull from fruit. For them, form is as important

as function, chase as a part of catch. To learn is not

sufficient, they need to touch the primary source. Great

knowledge is of little service to them blended, flavored,

and re-solidified for grazing.

They must learn from elder and historical hunter-

gatherers good form in hunting, even that it’s alright to

leave the field. This message can only be passed down

directly, and is lost in the process of chopping and

- 49 -


cooking preferred by grazers. The conditioning of wild

catch serves as its very purpose to denature, so that the

substance may be molded by the intention of the cook.

Let it settle as a feather on the moon that

common textbook and teacher too often spoonfeed

puree of Bald Eagle breast, saturated with corn syrup

and synthetic spice, because the label says ‘knowledge is

power’. Sure there is protein, but the strength gained will

no more help the student find an Eagle than cow’s milk

or fried field-mouse.

Those minds gifted and burdened so, to absorb

unknown fluids from beyond the corral of social affair,

must discover and explore the currents which tickle

their spirit. Charles Darwin felt it to write “this gave me

intense pleasure, so that my backbone would sometimes

shiver.” Darwin speaks of the wild pleasure aroused by

discovery from beyond the socio-pastoral bounds of

contemporary understanding. The being convulses

with pleasure from solitary creation in a way only to be

seduced.

The creator in mankind is too powerful to be

drugged and raped as the will and womb too often

are for the purposes of dominant others. This is not to

speculate that the creative activity of a human brain

acts in some objective virtue, though it is off-balanced

toward the good of the species; for otherwise mankind

would be long grass. It must arise for the individual’s


- 50 -

interest however this may lead and to what horizon.

Tell the HR department that they cannot buy creativity,

only bread and materials for creative people, and that

the supply is limited by nature and furthermore by

allowance of cultivation.

Here we discuss the hunter and gatherer of

creative spirit. Man is to the creative spirit domestic

canine in want of table scraps, and more liberal is the

gentle humorous child. What are music and comedy but

lord and savior?

It must be crystal that painting and theater

classes are no more conducive to creative development

than politics or science, except as a change of clothes

and rearrangement of furniture. Fortunately the issue is

more bloody and structural than these topical ointments

soothe. Everyone get in your places, we’re going

through Silent Night one more time. Ok, for our next

assignment I would like everyone to paint a still life. In

fourteen ninety three Columbus stopped to pee.

The genius thinks something different because

genius thinks different; worldview. Worldview is not

something you can change by joining Oprah’s book

club, it’s why you joined the club in the first place. This

distinction is important because grazing and wanting

to graze forms a significantly different worldview than

hunting and gathering and wanting to. The book club

might open you up to new things, but that’s why you

- 51 -


joined it.

Our education is based on and aims to refine the

grazer worldview, and rightly so, the classroom is in a

barn. Outside the field there is no regularly scheduled

programming except the sunrise and sunset; not even

the heartbeat is steady. In the lunchroom we eliminate

ants, on the hunt they may be informant, lemony treat,

or even sitcom. In the field we are king, and all is subject

to the demands of a goal such as corn harvest. As king

of the field we know that the more control we have over

the field, water, pests, nutrients, the higher our yield.

Outside the enforced simplicity of our field lurk qualities

not produced under sterile conditions. The hunter and

gatherer go off into the raw complexity to bring back

something of value not in the field. There is more out

there than we could ever dream of, let alone bring back.

Since we have the fields well under control, this

committee hereby declares that all who show a taste for

complexity be exposed to the thought and catches of

successful hunter-gatherers and encouraged to explore

by their own sense of interest so that it may grow strong

and sharp. An acute tearing grove will develop on the

interest from adventure outside the field; this will make

it easy to separate the frivolous from the essential.

Note that the farmer makes an outline and fills

it in, whereas the gatherer and hunter prepare and set

off on a tack with the wind. Whereas the barn-builder’s


- 52 -

worldview is based on a 3-dimensional topology

which may also concern the breakdown of materials

as a function of time, adventurer Benoit Mandelbrot

squeezed his fractals and wrote “effective dimension

concerns the relation between mathematical sets

and natural objects [...] a novelty of this essay is that it

allows the value of effective dimension to be a fraction.”

Though builder’s lumber is straight enough to build a

barn, most of us know that molecules aren’t straight,

atoms aren’t round, and neither is anything else. Barn

builder may not care, but paint chemist may.

Appreciation for the fruits of exploration will

increase in those who explore most, as they begin to

understand the unique heroic nature of discovery; to see

that it is not a given but rather gift. Do not be confused,

creation is a process of discovery. To really discover,

one’s mind must be able to free itself from authority.

The known tends to be a slab by which new ways and

ideas must first crack or find cracks in, through which

they may come to light.

The divergent spirit, the hunter-gatherer learns

to defy authority inwardly and outwardly to the point

of reflex. On the adventure one develops a worldview

where everything is seen to have cracks that open so

wide the known becomes but tags. This worldview

tends to overcome hierarchical forces altogether. These

cracks are the basis of science and democracy, as well as

- 53 -


traditional arts; open for progress. In democracy, power

is restricted and overthrow is built into the system. In

science every theory, law, and bit of evidence has an

assumed degree of certainty of less than one hundred

percent.

The founding fathers of the United States of

America understood the importance of freedom to

progress. Thomas Jefferson suspected “there must

doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of

our people produced by the existence of slavery among

us. [...] Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for

man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of

all education in him.” Obedience and dominance are

easily imitated, and necessary to heard life, but their

limits must be clear. The master-slave, farmer-field,

teacher-student dynamic inhibits the fundamental

development of creativity and stalls progress. On the

power of compensation Jefferson, “with money we will

get men, said Cesar, and with men we will get money.”

Is it clear that the draw of money tends to

produce more of the same, whereas personal interest

tends to produce novelties? Innovation in consumables

on the free market is driven by customer preference for

the new and improved. This improvement is no mere

opulence, rather it trends to increased efficiency for

consumers who call it convenience.

Adam Smith in the 1700’s remarked that


- 54 -

“abundance of food, of which, in consequence of the

improvement of land, many people have the disposal

beyond what they themselves can consume, is the great

cause of the demand both for the precious stones, as

well as for every other convenience and ornament of

dress, lodging, household furniture, and equipage, food

not only constitutes the principal part of the riches

of the world, but it is the abundance of food which

gives the principal part of their value to many other

sorts of riches.” This committee has been reminded

by the demands of our adventure beyond the field, of

the distinction between convenience and ornament,

precious stones and equipage; to re-edge the tearing

groove on our sense of interest. We have found this

discernment to be the best guide of what to bring on our

adventures and more importantly of what to seek and

bring back to the field. This discernment is too specific

to be instructed and tested, it must be developed and

exercised by the demands of wilderness.

The urge often manifest as ‘why’ is suppressed

by the heavy hand of authority, money, tests, etc. It is

not to say that these are necessary, this is obvious; the

boundaries of their effectiveness and utility must be

clear to us who are in want or need of progress.

Drop this book right now and thank your heretic

science teacher if lab ever allowed more creativity

than baking a pumpkin pie by the recipe on the side

- 55 -


of the can. There is no time or patience in chemistry

lab for cracks. Alright let’s go, I need blue crystals from

everyone by 10:45, just follow the directions and ask

for help if you don’t understand a step. Don’t forget

to record the weight, volume, and absorbance of

everything on your worksheet. Eleven o’clock, alright

now I want everyone to make as many pins as they can

in the next forty five minutes and then stick one of them

in your left eye, this assignment is worth 100 points.

The value of the Internet is in part a function

of its bits of data transmitted per dollar minus the bits

per dollar of other forms of communication, this is an

enormous quantity. There is a more qualitative value in

the Internet, the phenotype of superconductivity. The

cost to send a picture from Ann Arbor to Washington

DC is the same as to Berlin or even a hundred places at

once. Of course this high temperature superconductor

has heating costs but this is a demand of the material

based on how much of it you want to keep warm and

how refined it is.

The significance of ever increasing capacity

for frictionless flow of information, for students and

the specific future demands of their economy, is less

straightforward and clear than ever in human history.

Adam Smith recalls that “before the art of printing, a

scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very

nearly synonymous.” As the known becomes the easily


- 56 -

accessed by all at any time, the toil of memorization

loses value. The handheld filter pump is much lighter

than potable water.

Discernment on the fly becomes more

advantageous as muddy information is everywhere,

no need to carry what can be filtered on demand. The

water retention of modern education is still essential for

many just as strong muscle is not and will not become

obsolete, but just as physical labor its value will continue

to decrease. If you have a good filter pump, some bottles

are necessary to the mission, but likely not the jugs

of antiquity, and antiquity here means the twentieth

century.

Adam Smith is clear on this “the man who

works upon brass and iron, works with instruments

and upon materials of which the temper is always

the same, or very nearly the same. But the man who

ploughs the ground with a team of horses or oxen,

works with instruments of which the health, strength,

and temper, are very different upon different occasions.

The condition of the materials which he works upon,

too, is as variable as that of the instruments which

he works with, and both require to be managed with

much judgment and discretion.” Important here is the

development of judgment and discretion stimulated

by working in uncertainty. Smith adds “his voice and

language are more uncouth and more difficult to be

- 57 -


understood by those who are not used to them.” This

could be interpreted as a simple lack of sophistication,

except that Smith continues “his understanding,

however, being accustomed to consider a greater variety

of objects, is generally much superior to that of the

other, whose whole attention from morning till night

is commonly occupied in performing one or two very

simple operations.”

The sense of discernment is retarded by

the educational emphasis of memory because the

effort spent in the process of specific store and recall

diminishes diversity of exposure; this causes boredom

in many. This boredom is often apprehended as a lack

of sophistication which ideally will be trained out of the

students. This boredom is a signal that clearly pinpoints

a fault in the educational system, not the student who

suffers from it.

Kurt Vonnegut on “how to tell a good picture

from a bad one”, quotes Syd Solomon “Look at a

million pictures, and you can never be mistaken.” For

all of human history the limiting factor was cost of

distribution, as in ‘we can only buy so many books’.

This restriction has only in the third millennium CE

been lifted by indoor plumbing. It is only now possible

to stand on hind legs and apply the front two in fine

manipulation. Erwin Schrödinger professed “next

to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in


- 58 -

our lives. Instead of letting the ingenious machinery

we have invented produce an increasing amount of

superfluous luxury, we must plan to develop it so that it

takes off human beings all the unintelligent, mechanical,

‘machine-like’ handling.” This applies to ‘machine-like’

thinking as much as physical labor. With the advent of

spellchecking word processors and search engines, the

spelling bee is as useful as a beauty pageant for hogs.

Sophisticated writing develops by exposure

to a diversity of sophisticated writers, and conversely

cannot arise from mastery of distilled grammar rules.

The rules are too general to be useful in development of

skill, and typically impair interest. Point is, the demand

for and resources to cultivate creativity, in those minds

conducive to it, are now ubiquitous. To eat the fruit

of the tree of knowledge will confer discernment, but

only in those who themselves have a taste for it, and in

proportion to how much they eat.

Free Markets and Free Minds

The human nervous system is a highly adaptive

control system for the body, and the economy is a highly

adaptive control system for the body of human material

resources; both actively tuned to their ecosystem. It

should be little surprise they are two peas in a pod like

electricity and water. The resemblance of function gives

way to reveal a resemblance in form. Around the sphere

- 59 -


we have an assortment of varied economies mostly

divided by national boundary and industry, and highly

integrated by communication and logistics. Inside our

domes we have an assortment of varied information

handling structures mostly divided by region and

function, and highly integrated by nerve tracts,

hormonal signals, and blood flow.

Alan Greenspan remembers “What they were

running into was the problem of central planning in a

market economy - the market will always undermine

any attempt at control.” This is the problem we are

running into with education, the most creative minds

operate in most resemblance of the most creative

economies; free market. Greenspan paraphrases Joseph

Schumpeter “A market economy will increasingly

revitalize itself from within by scrapping old and failing

businesses and then reallocating resources to newer,

more productive ones.” This is also true of the brain

economy, based on how heavily invested it is in each

neurological structure.

To build a new structure is more work for the

brain than to use one that already exists. The human

brain sucks energy like a server farm, but its design is

heavily constrained by food scarcity. Regional blood

flow is actively managed, there is only so much to go

around.

Synaptogenesis, the construction of new brain


- 60 -

structures is very specific, stimulated by activity, and

lack of activity can allow processes to dissolve. HD

Thoreau knew that “we need to be provoked, -goaded

like oxen, as we are into a trot.”

Memorization is heavy investment in a few

pieces of infrastructure deemed to be important enough

to warrant the cost. Due to the rapid expansion of

energy consumption and even greater ballooning of new

communication, production, and transport efficiencies,

the economy becomes less controllable, less predictable,

more wild, but also more powerful and more adaptive.

The less controllable, less predictable mind too can

become more adaptable and more powerful. Those

activities which can be outsourced and automated free

up local resources, which can be then applied to less

systematic endeavor which tends to be of higher value;

skilled labor is more valuable than unskilled. The more

dynamic economy demands more dynamic minds.

The dynamic adaptability of minds varies across

the spectrum of individuals; this is a born-in tendency

which is affected by the environment. Those more

imitative minds tend to be less dynamic in part because

more outside control is developed into the system.

One outward form this can take is the hesitation to act

or think in a way ‘I have not already seen in someone

else’. Any new behavior tends to draw attention,

whether adaptive or maladaptive. Variation across this

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dimension tends to be a result of willingness to take

risks, which is increased by factors such as the intensity

of need for novelty and tolerance for failure.

The basis of free-market efficiency is the drive

of each individual and company to maximize their

own profits. Any economic agent that finds room for

improvement uncovers an opportunity to profit. This

is also true for the development of ideas. All ideas

can and eventually will be improved in some way.

This improvement is made possible when someone

identifies a weakness. Once a weakness or ignorance in

an idea is identified, an opportunity for improvement

then opens. The one who ‘sees’ a weakness then

has solid ground for improvement, whether the

weakness is an economic inefficiency or a deficient

idea. Identification of a weakness makes improvement

possible. For example: if a bridge collapses, the

weak-point that allowed this to happen is the place

to start understanding the underlying problem. The

development and improvement of business follows

the pattern of the development and improvement of

ideas. Where improvement in business is motivated

primarily by profit, the development of ideas is primarily

motivated by the relief of suffering. Since money can

act as compensation for suffering, many ideas aimed at

reliving it are profit opportunities themselves. People

are paid to suffer, and are willing to pay to reduce their


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suffering.

Short of catastrophic failure such as bridge

collapse, the identification of weakness in ideas can

be very subtle, and thus ignored by most people. Most

people aren’t looking for the weaknesses in ideas when

they seem to work ‘well enough’. Progress happens as

a response to dissatisfaction. To be dissatisfied with

a bridge or idea that is not about to collapse is a risk,

‘common’ sense says ‘don’t fix what’s not broken’.

The amazing nature of human progress is that

some people aren’t satisfied when things simply work

well enough, they see room for improvement. This is

highly discouraged in current educational process, and

those who can’t consistently ignore their sense that

progress is possible are disadvantaged as a result. The

attitude is ‘look at all this progress we’ve made’, rather

than ‘hey, if you think you have a better idea, try it out,

your risk’. The bias is often sadly that ‘these students

don’t know enough to make any improvements’. If a

student, however immature, sees something that can

be improved, that is their ticket. Anyone who thinks

improvement is unnecessary, and discourages the

pursuit of it, does not have the key component. The

drive to understand a problem, once it is noticed that

something’s wrong, is all the guidance necessary to

explore possible means of improvement. Charles

Darwin curls his toes on the sharp edge of this boulder

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to cast “I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind

free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much

beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every

subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

This is the most powerful reservoir of learning potential,

and lies yet massively untapped in the academic

environment.

No progress can be made by those unwilling

to take risks, and the greatest improvements are all

made by great risk takers. To think and act in new

ways is always a risk, significantly as a gamble of social

position. To exhibit standard fashion is default and

tends to require the least energy. The memorization

heavy framework of education as we know it tends to act

on this level by promoting stable, well defined thought

structures decreed from a higher authority. The solidity

and dominance of these structures is their weakness

in that a resistance to adaptation is formed. They exert

more directive force on the thought process, and more

force is necessary to avoid or change them.

The glass bottle is not made obsolete by plastic,

rather its range of uses is constricted. The most plastic

among us cannot be made rigid except by great waste

of raw material; and so in education the importance

of material science and economic demand waits to

be adequately addressed. Greenspan pointed “the

steel beverage can went the way of the telegraph key


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and money followed the innovation.” The outwardly

motivated follow money, and money follows the

inwardly motivated. Everyone follows the most creative

thinkers whether directly or indirectly, and the most

creative thinkers follow their sense of curiosity; this

determines the course of human progress.

The man to be blamed for calculus class, Isaac

Newton, is described by holder of his old position at

Cambridge, Stephen Hawking as “one of the poorest

students, with his teachers’ reports stating he was

‘inattentive’ and ‘idle’. Despite his curiosity and

demonstrable passion for learning, he was unable to

apply himself to schoolwork.” Schoolwork in this case

is analogous to government micro-management of

industry as Greenspan details “deregulation was the

Ford administration’s great unsung achievement. It’s

difficult to imagine how strait-jacketed American

business was then. Airlines, trucking, railroads,

buses, pipelines, telephones, television, stock-brokers,

financial markets, savings banks, utilities - all operated

under heavy regulation. Operations were monitored

down to the tiniest detail. [...] The Chicago economists

argued that government should intervene less, not more,

because scientific regulation was a myth.” Scientific

regulation of the learning process too is a myth.

Just as increasing efforts to regulate the under-

achieving US economy became counterproductive, so

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too for our under-achieving students. The ‘curiosity

and demonstrable passion for learning’ exhibited by

‘inattentive’ young Isaac Newton is the telltale mark

of a free market mind, and the deep resistance to

schoolwork is clear sign of misapplied regulation.

This is no issue of good teachers and bad

teachers, we’re operating a failed theory. On the

influence of theory Alan Greenspan, “one year, President

Eisenhower actually apologized to the American people

for running a $3 billion deficit.” The optimal risk-reward

ratio for the creative mind is higher than that of the

majority, but the educational program currently running

on our system has no way to effectively handle this. We

literally throw away the most powerful minds because

they defy our Newtonian model of learning, a common

aversion of the eye.

The right hand will push ‘start what you finish’,

but for the follower of interest this is wrong. For the free

market mind to follow interest is much more important

than to force completion; it’s perfectly alright to catch

and release. In learning to hunt and gather, to track the

interest is more important than to kill and drag home.

That will surely come later of its own accord as the

value of fresh catch becomes clear and necessary to the

hunter, psychologically and socioeconomically.

Alright, we have the beast in our sights, what

should we do with it?


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6

Bag It and Tag It

To capture and hold the attention, even of

students, is in crude form. Humans can sense this, but

also are trained to sit at attention and shake for a treat.

As dogs, chase them with sufficient force of character

and they will run, run from them in playful spirit and

they will chase.

The attention is live animal spirit; only the least

quick and cunning can be captured and held. In the

age of expanding waistlines and information bloat,

who dare challenge the virtue of ‘hyper’-activity and

sensitivity to boredom? Those with strong taste for fluff,

who have impotence of thought to show for it. The dam

need not be removed by the dynamite force of Alfred

Nobel, education as we know it holds a great body of

importance.

A side channel we must dig so for fish to swim up

and spawn in their ancestral waters and grow ever more


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fruitful; surely to the nourishment of all. Those whose

interest cannot be readily caught and detained ‘for their

own good’ need an ever-present way around the dam of

promise-to-repeat learn-and-test.

The extra allowance of taking on a label such as

Learning Disabled is grossly insufficient. Extra test time

and individual assistance bend over a too small nail, to

ignore the original purpose of fastener; their wood is too

hard. Those too hard headed to take finishing nails must

be allowed and even encouraged to swim up the side

channel and earn their creative freedom.

Every dam must be flanked by a side channel,

and side channels must be carefully designed by

those who themselves have hooks for the Learning

Disabled tag. Only they can fully appreciate the diverse

conditions which favor the great spawn of swimming

ideas; the polymorphic mating dance which serves to

arouse wet hot interest into reproductive friction. Henry

David Thoreau suspected that “the works of the great

poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only

great poets can read them.”

Though not everyone can excel in the imitation

game, many who can stay afloat in the river may yet

benefit from upstream swimming in the side channel;

it must be open to all. The burden of formally tested

qualification has no place here. This means that the side

channel must be constructed to be of sum benefit to

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Bag It and Tag It

students, so that to swim up it is no less developmentally

advantageous than standard instruction. To station a

park ranger with a brochure at the dam to select and

throw over those fish come to spawn further upstream

ignores the fact that the effectiveness of current

educational theory is limited.

It must be rocky glacial stream clear that the

limits, of conscious educational understanding which

can be systematically passed on across the board, are

not soon to dissipate. The park rangers will always miss

some fish, and the effect on spawning of the stress from

being so handled is poorly understood. The value of

hunting and gathering must be acknowledged so those

so inclined can be excused from grazing when the drive

stirs in them or when processed feed is unpalatable,

rather than expected to stalk wily ideas on a full stomach

after hours. Standard educational practice is to remain

default, but every student must at all times have the

option to go off alone or as a group on the hunt. This

is no excuse to simply waste time in idle, prevention of

laziness is why we test learning.

The concern that absent looming tests, laziness

will creep in from the woods and drain productivity is

very real. The boundary here is that reliance on testing

to repel blood sucking laziness also limits potential.

In the field a coating of DEET is highly effective pest

repellent, and often necessary to seated warm-bloods.


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On the hunt movements and wind currents can allow

one to avoid both insectual predation and detection by

potential large game. Here the net effect of mandatory

bug spray is negative. The brave minority who venture

outside the field quickly learn when and how to

effectively test themselves when ‘good enough’ steps

aside for amazing as it charges by, hot on the trail of

something rare and delicious.

Still for a second, everyone, a standard must be

set out to dry. A solid foundation for our free and brave

students to exhibit their find or catch and tell the story of

their explorations. If no catch was got, then the burden

of their story itself to bear fruit is so greater. To stand

before their fellow students and provide food for thought

will be their evidence of time-well-employed. Let the

structure be inscribed in front with lions and tigers and

bear the words ‘all who present here, may they be subtle

or bold, but always original and never boring’.

Beyond proof of industry, this exercise will

develop the skill of presentation, all-important to those

who will to bring ‘new ways and methods’ to their social

group, on whatever scale. This is a skill of primary

importance to divergent characters, which is certain to

ease integration into wider society.

Shyness and/or crude disregard for social

sensibilities tend to hinder the presentation skills of

personalities supernormally inclined to novelty and

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Bag It and Tag It

creativity, especially so for the young. These same

people hold a supernormal potential to develop

presentation skills. In main because when allowed to

follow their wild interest they will have things to lay on

the table that the more conventionally inclined won’t, a

more effective grasp of these things they found or caught

in situ, and more precise emotional force under them.

That which they have to feed the group is less common,

and they have uncommon command of and affection for

it.

No standardized set of testable guidelines can

effectively prepare one to present their discoveries,

creations, and stories of ‘failed’ quest to a group. The

enforced presentations common to K-16 promote a

limited generation of presentation skill. Too often

presentations are profoundly boring. If the presenter is

forced to fake interest, so too will the crowd. Of course

the hope in the academic presentation is that student

will catch interest as a virus by sufficient exposure.

Firstly exposure length and depth is rarely sufficient to

confer strong infection, and secondly exposure is more

often than not to a weakened strain or even a harmless

solution of surface proteins.

A work of personal interest will conjure more

resources than one of mandate. Think this, ‘did I dream

of study drills, money and success, or good additions

to the project last night?’, or during lunch break or class


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for that matter. Unconscious brain activity is very real,

powerful, and sometimes demands democratic rule. If

you don’t understand this yet, go out and get addicted

to cigarettes for a while, and then quit; it may take a few

tries.

At risk, in the divorce of interest from means and

result of creative labor, for eventual reward of grades or

money, is depth of processing. Mandatory assignment

offloads the weight to make a presentation amazing

for the audience. The audience is obstacle to the true

purpose of good grade from the teacher. In presenting a

new meal to their people, the returned adventurer is to

harvest the energy of audience reaction. This is to take

the response of each mind on paper recorded during

and after the meal as burps, mmmm’s, and table scraps.

A reasonable mandate to make of the diners as it will

tend to spur them out of the seat of passive receptacle.

Here too important is the maintenance of an open

channel because the hunter will grow understanding of

the listeners themselves in addition to light shed onto

the catch.

An even greater source of energy can take form

of audience question during presentation. This cannot

be reasonably mandated, but is to be allowed and

encouraged. This practice strongly discourages the

banal practice of script recital.

The recital of script is in opposition to the spirit

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Bag It and Tag It

of the hunter-gatherer and inhibits free market mind

activity. The presentation too must be a hunt wherein

the audience serves to keep the presenter alert and

wily. As hunter runs through the audience to scare up

pheasant, therein may wait blood-sucker and tooth

bearer alike. To stir myriad creature form up into

activity inside presenter and audience is our stated

objective. The bluff of scarecrow and mask become

obvious as all else leaps and ducks and blinks.

It must be cold bucket of tears clear that the

test which can be cheated on demands but a puppet

show. The highest and most rare feedback of course

will appear in the form of individual ecosystems grown

more lively and complex by such intercourse, and the

successful transfection of interesting species able to cut

out a niche in new environments. The speciation and

geographic dispersion of ideas increases their chance

of survival as outer conditions vary, and in doing so

increase the survivability of the entire system. The virtue

of finding and creating ideas, new to the psycho-local

and socio-local ecosystems, and skillfully introducing

them is nothing short of survival advantage.

Human history, through the lens of progressively

expanding survival power on the species level, rides

in a cart pulled by the generation and transmission of

new idea-forms. The same rockets and nuclear chain

reactions that have yet to destroy us are also the first


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means any earthling lifeform has ever produced which

may deflect great meteor impact.

The Internet is no less significant to educational

method than the introduction of mass-printed text.

A simple replacement of book with screen in the

classroom is insufficient. Terrifying as it appears at

first, the idea that any standard set of curriculum can

be sufficient to the education of twenty first century

minds is obsolete. The discreet set of essential subjects

is quickly becoming handicap. The sheer speed and

complexity of the modern world is becoming too great

for a serial top-down system to teach. The twenty first

century is when massively parallel processing becomes

both widely possible and necessary. Allowing and

encouraging those students so inclined to take on some

of the work, of what to learn and why, is an important

trim in this direction.

The fact that current curricula moves the

eardrums much more than the synapses of an

intelligent minority of students, means that to allow

them unrestricted freedom of exploration, risks much

less than it stands to reward if skillfully executed.

The human brain differs most profoundly from the

modern computer in that stored information is itself

the processor. Too many waiting programs and too

much stored data erode the performance of our digital

electronic modern computing marvels. Not so for the

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Bag It and Tag It

human brain, the more you know the more you can

learn and the more happens in your brain in response to

the environment; the more you can do.

The challenge of twenty first century education

is to cultivate powerful minds, this objective is now

more important than creating a good standardized

foundation. The foundation of each mind faces

increasingly exacting demands, determined by the

persistent properties of the individual character, be they

genetically or socioeconomically varied in expression.

No intelligence/personality test will be capable of

corralling students to their optimal career destiny unless

progress is frozen solid, in which case Homo sapiens is

guaranteed extinction. The standard foundation is not

entirely obsolete, but its universal application is.

Allow those who must and even those who can,

find and prepare food for thought more conducive

to brain growth, to develop this skill as a way to buy

their freedom from regularly scheduled programming.

Instead of falling through the cracks or being tied down

with dopamine reuptake inhibitors, they will begin to

build minds which have throughout history been the

subject of myth and legend.

A major obstacle to such relinquishment of

control by well established educational tradition will

most certainly take the form of restrictions imposed on

time frame, content, and format. Due dates and topical


- 76 -

mandates are the tightest held strings of conventional

process, these must be given as much slack as can be

used in the compounding of learning interest. Low

interest return on time investment can be a sign of

too much or too little slack; just as loose loan rates

encourage wasted investment and excess spending on

disposable goods, and rates too tight prevent high risk/

reward investment in research and development. In

the modern economic environment, to take on too little

risk is itself a danger, and it must be opaque that this

is the engine of education system inadequacy today.

Failure by playing it too safe, failure by excessive micro-

management, failure by disregarding the creativity of its

members; a squandered resource of rising value.

Alan Greenspan highlights “a rarely discussed,

but important, macroeconomic determinant of

economic success is the extent of an economy’s

flexibility and hence its resilience to shocks.” Flexibility

is what these hunter-gatherer free market minds are

made of, not to be confused with tolerance for cookie

cutters. Those operating a right handed drive to some

easy way out of their assignments will find the challenge

of originality to draw more effort than to go with the

flow.

Upstream swimming will entail more labor than

simply getting with the program, and will tend to only

be chosen by those whose activity is driven, stroked,

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Bag It and Tag It

and pleasured by the invisible left hand. Carl Jung

summarized “the biographies of great artists make

it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so

imperious that it battens on their humanity and yolks

everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of

health and ordinary human happiness.” This of course it

the most ultraviolet end of the spectrum; point being the

drive can pull hard enough to swim upstream, and the

effort necessary to do so cannot be yoked to lazy animal.

Creative activity tends to steer the course of

manpower employment and so calls for increased

developmental attention as civilization progress

accelerates; to keep us on the road even if we don’t

know where we’re going. Do not fear, those so left

handed to act ‘at the cost of health and ordinary human

happiness’ are no more monstrous than right handed

workaholics in it for the cash, or the all ‘A’ student who

sacrifices balanced social development and ‘street

smarts’. The battle for productivity has hereto been

writing off the collateral damage of incomplete theory

on its taxes.

There is nothing so sacred in what is taught

to students today, that the option of free exploration,

by those who pursue it, can justifiably be prevented

in doing so. The option must be available at student

discretion, to the degree that a sufficiently creative

student need not do anything they find uninteresting,


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just as a sufficiently imitative student already need not

do anything creative. This will serve the side-end of

giving more traditional students some interesting things

to imitate. The full-frontal advantage will be that our

little kittens will have significant experience chasing

mice and rabbit by the time they need moose and bear

to survive.

But wait a second, what if the imagination runs

too wild? We don’t want our progeny foaming at the

mouth, unable to understand that fresh kill on the

doorstep isn’t always appreciated.

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7

The Imaginary Threat

Attention is pulled at by sensory input and

thought in its many forms. Attention to thought is

attention away from looking, listening, or any other

sense; even from the outer object of thought. The more

I think about what you just said, the less I continue to

listen to you.

Hyperfocus is to build great enough interest

in a thought process or sensory stream to detach

background accessory attentions. Imagine writing

secrets in your diary in a bedroom, door shut and no

one is home. Alright now try a chair facing the TV where

anyone could sneak up from behind for a peek. Interest

here is meant as a present moment force perceptively

active in your brain, not a generalized ‘I’m interested in

sidewalk design’, which can be interrupted by a sudden

interest in going to the hospital when your breath is

short, chest hurts, then left arm starts to simulate pins


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and needles.

Interestingly enough, Alan Greenspan wrote

“the concept of irrational exuberance came to me in

the bathtub one morning as I was writing a speech.”

It feels safe to speculate, the temporary relaxation

of external demand as the force pulling thought was

allowed reorient to the drag line of interest and release

imagination from rigid expectation. The secure,

comfortable, private environment of the bathtub freed

up more attention from immediate outer sensational

vigil, to watch the released imagination. The bathtub

in this way incubated in Greenspan exuberance

enough for the hatching of ‘irrational exuberance’

from his imagination. Greenspan elaborates “to this

day, the bathtub is where I get many of my best ideas.

my assistants have gotten used to typing from drafts

scrawled on damp yellow pads - a chore that got much

easier once we found a kind of pen whose ink doesn’t

run.”

Demands from outside the individual draw

energies from the ability to focus attention on inner

processes. This takes various forms, beyond gross

distraction when the dog whines for attention, many

of which remain unconscious. The subtle effects of

context on the attentional process are typically more

manageable once they can be consciously understood,

explored, and manipulated. A major driver behind

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contextual draw of attentional resources comes from

the need for self protection. This need acts on a primal

level to watch for threats to bodily survival. To sit with

the back to a wall will draw less residual attention than

to leave the back exposed. When attention is directed in

chasing an internal thought process, the force of interest

in this process is in competition with the drive to watch

your back, be it conscious or not. This is part of why

the bathtub behind closed doors is such a good place to

think.

Another important factor is the stimulus

of possibly relevant novelty, because it excites the

interest. Here the bathtub outwardly appears to be

disadvantageous, what could possibly be stimulating in

a comfortably familiar warm bathtub? Inner novelty, the

demands of the outside world are temporarily lightened

while soaking naked and alone in clean warm water.

This allows the imagination itself to generate interesting

stimuli.

Another major draw comes from the demands

of social interaction. Even the possibility of someone

who cannot reasonably be ignored can be demanding

of attentional resources. That is ‘I love you, but please

leave me alone, I’m working on something’. To be alone

or in an anonymous crowd can free up scarce resources

for application to thought. This is in part due to the

necessity of blood flow management in the brain, as


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energy distribution is actively tuned to regional demand.

Reduced need for oxygen, glucose, and construction

materials in one place frees them up to another.

Obviously other factors are important here, but blood

flow is the most straightforward to imagine, and makes

the point; we’ve all witnessed swelling of muscles,

genitals, and tissue in repair.

Since humans wield immense social intelligence,

the cost of employment is high. I suspect this is partial

cause of the sensationalized ability of some autistics to

exhibit savant capabilities. The autistic social system

is crippled, but for those with healthy social abilities,

disengagement can be useful where the task itself

doesn’t require social intelligence. Ideally in a group

project, where social activity is directed at the project

itself, resources are not wasted as group members

provide each other with relevant novelties. Still here,

pressures to go with the group and in turn stick closely

to convention tend to be strong.

Just as drives like self protection and social

interaction can drain resources in the background, so

too for a pet project. A developing thought process can

itself drain attentional resources, even when it goes

unnoticed. This becomes especially pronounced when

interest in a project is stronger than the force motivating

more mundane activity, such as mandated studies of no

currently active interest or relevant novelty. Even if the

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subject of stronger interest doesn’t consciously seem

active, often it is and so competes with the homework

assignment or attention to the teacher. This is where

many students with less propensity or even ability to

do what they are told tend to fall off and daydream or

disturb others with hyperactive defiance.

Defiance is a natural reaction to interruption

of the ability to think effectively. Not only great cause

of distress and draw of confidence, this opposition of

psychological forces too often degrades the ability of the

student to excel in any way. Often times the pressure

to complete assignments and learn for tests effectively

motivates the student to forcefully apply their efforts

to the given task to no avail. To no avail because their

‘people’ know they have more important things to do

than what the king decrees. The more pressure applied

against their freedom, the more they protest.

The control of information so useful in keeping

citizens in a repressed state is also useful in keeping

students with the program. The information age has

brought this issue to a boil in our free democratic state.

Students today are exposed to a significant diversity

of information, and yet classroom learning is highly

dictated. This is just fine for most, but the medication

of intelligent dissidents, who teachers, parents, and

doctor’s decree are underperforming, is misguided.

I here chance that to open a channel wherein


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students are able to earn their freedom of exploration,

will increase learning performance, while decreasing

dissent and adolescent drug use both prescribed

and illegal. Illegal drug use has a vast complex of

causes, but in the case outlined here, they in part

serve the role of Alan Greenspan’s bathtub. To reduce

the pressure against the creative forces acting in

the brains of students with a strong propensity to

independent thought will reduce the force they must

erect to overcome this pressure. Greenspan proclaims

“immersed in my bath, I’m as happy as Archimedes as I

contemplate the world.”

On the prescribed side of things,

methylphenidate and amphetamine make it easier

for students to hold their ‘people’ at bay just as in a

democratic society during an emergency, to artificially

notch up the terror alert meter. These drugs, code name

Ritalin, Concerta, and Adderall, literally tell the nervous

system ‘emergency, you can go back to what you were

doing when the threat has passed’ or the drug has

cleared. How fitting that when they get used to terror

level yellow the doctor must up the dose to orange.

Another commonly exploited method of artificial

terror level increase is fasting. This is often expressed

in human religious practice. The method is to develop

sufficient tolerance to the negative symptoms of an

empty stomach. The desired result is an increased

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concentration of focus, presumably developed to assist

in the acquisition of food in scarcity.

Democratic government and free market

economy work so well because they support activity

and progress in taking their natural course, with the

understanding that no one group or set of theories

can effectively control them. Same goes for brain

development and activity. A press release from the

National Institute of Health released November 2007

is titled “Brain Matures a Few Years Late in ADHD, But

Follows Normal Pattern” based on a survey of 40,000

cortex sites over a sample of 223 children diagnosed

with ADHD, and 223 controls. The report notes that

“the delayed pattern of maturation observed in ADHD

is the opposite of that seen in other developmental

brain disorders like autism, in which the volume of

brain structures peak at a much earlier than normal

age.” In addition the report states both that “the motor

cortex emerged as the only area that matured faster than

normal in the youth with ADHD”, and “circuitry in the

frontal and temporal areas that integrate information

from the sensory areas with the higher order functions

peaked later.” The most powerful brains on earth, the

human brain, already matures later than any other. The

long term trend of human brain evolution has been

toward increasing capacity for higher level function. The

observations of brain development, in this sample of


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humans showing ADHD traits, is consistent with overall

progress in human brain evolution; think more plastic.

This is cause for reasonable doubt. E.O. Wilson, winner

of the National Medal of Science and two Pulitzer Prizes

for nonfiction, pointed out that “human nature is the

hereditary rules of mental development.” What other

species nurtures its young for upwards of twenty years?

None.

Something like 1 in 20 American students is

medicated for ADHD. Whatever the exact number, it’s

high enough to flood the black market with certified

clean speed. This is compounded by the fact that most

illicit buyers are fellow students who think to themselves

‘they give it to 7-year olds, it can’t be that bad’.

No human today understands higher level

mental phenomena well enough to say with a high

degree of certainty that ADHD is a defect of healthy

human development or evolution. There is a real

chance that continued neglectful treatment of people

who are strongly inclined to follow their sense of interest

and unable to reasonably do otherwise amounts to

partial lobotomy of the human spirit. The possibility

that a terrifying forfeit of long held control, made

possible only recently by information technology, could

increase the overall creative capacity of humanity is

real. The fact that increased control of the educational

process made possible by drugs has obscured the

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problem of advancement of understanding and method

is offensive to the pursuit of happiness. We of this

minority forgive, for you know not what you do, but

please listen to us when we say your theories of mind

are misguided by ignorance and cause us to suffer. We

demand the freedom to advance. Bullish on the Earth

life big brain experiment; have we made ourselves clear?

The Eagle against Extinction.


- 88 -

- 89 -

8

The Eagle Spirit

Let it be ice sculpture clear that every memory

is substrate for higher thought. The abstraction and re-

application of memories is the primary process behind

powerful idea creation. Metaphor is the mechanism

of wisdom which tends to increase with age and

experience. The diversity of experience is primary

determinant of the diversity of thought each mind is

capable of.

This is the advantage of novelty seeking, it

expands brain power. Furthermore, as the mind seeks

to clarify and concretize a new idea developing within

it, relevant novelties are sought out and favored. The

more powerful mind tends to form as a result of a more

powerful drive to execute this process. Decades after

accepting his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,

James Watson reflected “a leader’s mind must

continually be reconfigured through exposure to new


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patterns of acting and thinking.” An education system

will always be ineffective to the degree which it opposes

this process.

The mind is driven to collect the memories

it needs to develop its own ideas. Any nation which

accounts for this developmental fact in the modern

economic environment will become more powerful as a

result.

The most significant economic shift in this

information age is the increasing share of real dollar

value held as intellectual property, in proportion to land

and material assets. Alan Greenspan reports that the

Council of Economic Advisors “estimated that a third

of market value of publicly traded U.S. corporations

in September 2005 ($15 trillion) was attributable to

intellectual property.” The significance of this is that the

value of brain real estate is and will continue to increase

faster than land real estate values. This major trend

increases the economic pressure and monetary reward

for best use of brain real estate.

Best use of land and resources is the most

significant advantage of market economics, because the

owner who profits from their own property naturally

has the greatest interest in its optimal development, use,

and upkeep. This needs to be taken advantage of in the

education process, so that students develop confidence

to conceive ideas that are profitably actionable and take

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The Eagle Spirit

risks to execute them; Reliance on their own ability to

think effectively. Some of them have a strong drive to,

and others will pick it up by example.

As we see amazing examples of what others

achieve, we too strive to excel in our own way. This

chapter is powered in part by videos of men first walking

on the moon in 1969; the Eagle has landed.

Brain real estate is different from land real estate

in that it cannot be sold or inherited. Not only that,

but everyone is born with a plot of their very own. This

is not intellectual property, but rather the means of

generating this resource.

The increasing economic share of intellectual

property increases the value of brain real estate by

increasing demand for intellectual product. Individual

brains and plots of land vary widely in how they may be

most profitably employed. Manhattan bedrock is good

for skyscrapers, and Midwest flatland is good for crops

and sprawling single-story facilities; land owners profit

by this type of knowledge. Since each individual is an

owner of brain space, it is ultimately their responsibility

how best to capitalize. Driving each student to learn

how best to capitalize on their own brain is the most

important aim of early twenty-first century education.

The gap between where education is and where

it could be, is telling students what they need to know,

compared to their being allowed to figure out how best


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to apply their own learning efforts. Point being, the

value of self knowledge and its application to learning is

on a long term rise.

The fact that everyone gets their own plot of

brain, to cultivate and develop as best they can until

death, is an equalizing force, and the basis of the

mythical American Dream. Today students are made

to think ‘if I study hard and get good grades I will be

successful’. This is simply not true in a civilization swept

up as ours is in creative destruction.

Case in point: in fifth grade, a friend and I

learned to program computers on our own for fun,

and this was before we had Windows. We used

trial and error on the list of commands in the help

file. We applied complex algebraic expressions with

many variables well before being taught algebra in

school. When the other students were learning how

to manipulate letters as placeholders for numbers, I

was struggling to translate what I already knew into

the archaic and arbitrary pencil and paper forms

being forced on us. It all seemed too pointless. While

my more submissive friend went on to become

valedictorian, I started sleeping through class and

getting Ds.

Countless cases of wasted potential fit this

pattern. To correct this specific problem in our

education system will literally increase the growth

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The Eagle Spirit

potential of our economy.

Both invisible hands rise as humanity expands.

As death glares dark and empty, wonder dives in to

fill the void with profuse new form and sighs ‘ahhhh,

space and time of my own to give shape’. Passion to

understand that the effects of our action in this short life

may live on as long as mankind; who dare ask ‘what

may this toil of my spirit do for the life of my species’ in

earnest, does so under the dark cloud of death as a bolt

of lightning.

Freedom is not an ambiguous concept, its

temporary creation is the ground under human

progress; a goddamn instinct. Look for it inside and out,

there you will be a tasty morsel of flesh under a great

hungry Eagle. May this power drive you to burrow or

inspire you to fly; the future of humanity is up for grabs.

Good night.


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Sources

Sources by Age:

Leonardo Da Vinci1519 - (his death) ‘The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci’

(Translated by R. C. Bell, compiled by Jean Paul Richter)

Niccolo Machiavelli

1517 – ‘The Discourses on Livy’

Adam Smith

1776 – ‘The Wealth of Nations’

Thomas Jefferson

1787 – ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’

Charles Darwin

1809-1882 - ‘The Autobiography of Charles Darwin’ edited by

Nora Barlow

1974 - Quoted in (‘Darwin on Man, A Psychological Study of

Creativity’ by Howard Gruber)


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Henry David Thoreau

1854 – ‘Walden’

John Stuart Mill

1867 – ‘Dissertations and Discussions’

Fredrich Nietzsche

1888 – ‘The Twilight of the Idols’

1885 – ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1909 – ‘The Heart of Emerson’s Journals’ (edited by Bliss Perry)

Henry Poincare

1913 – ‘The Foundations of Science’ (translated by George Bruce

Halsted)

Herbert George Wells

1920 – ‘Outline of History’

Sigmund Freud

1930 – ‘Civilization and its Discontents’

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Sources

Rainer Maria Rilke

1934 - ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ (translated by M.D. Herter

Norton)

Erwin Schrodinger

1944 – ‘What is Life?’

Clive Staples Lewis

1947 - ‘The Abolition of Man’

Albert Einstein

1956 – ‘Out of My Later Years’

1993 – Quoted in (‘Creating Minds’ by Howard Gardner)

Martin Luther King Jr.

1964 – ‘Why We Can’t Wait’

Carl Jung

1966 – ‘The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature’

Benoit Mandelbrot

1977 – ‘The Fractal Geometry of Nature’


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Richard Alexander

1987 – ‘The Biology of Moral Systems’

Robert Laughlin

2005 – ‘A Different Universe (Reinventing Physics From the

Bottom Down)’

Kurt Vonnegut

2005 – ‘A Man Without a Country’

Stephen Hawking

2005 – ‘God Created the Integers’ Edward Owen Wilson

2006 – ‘The Creation’

James Watson

2007 – ‘Avoid Boring People, Lessons from a Life in Science’

Alan Greenspan

2007 - ‘The Age of Turbulence, Adventures in a New World’

Craig Venter

2007 – ‘Interview: Gene Pioneers’ New Scientist 20 October 2007

p.56

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Richard Branson

2007 - ‘Richard Branson: Life at 30,000 feet’ Video Interview TED

Talks http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/18

National Institute of Health News

2007 – ‘Brain Matures a few Years Late in ADHD, but Follows

Normal Pattern’ http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/nov2007/

nimh-12.htm


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�e Drive of Progress in Man

By Josh Valdes

�e Drive of Progress in Man is an adventure into that which is actually made free in a free market economy; the free market mind. Once transplanted into the imagination, this compact plot of diverse thought-forms will continue to grow in your brain, well after the pages are laid to rest. �e rare individuals who are extraordinary host to �e Drive of Progress characterize humanity as the most powerful species of life yet to arise on Earth. �e insights gained by this exploration apply directly to a systematic weak-point in our education system; that is the forced memorization, and intellectual conformity which bias the learning process against the most creative and independent thinkers; people with an exceptional drive to advance the status quo. ADHD and Dyslexia are two major forces in the development of such minds, they force �e Drive of Progress from its slumber by necessity.


The Drive of Progress in Man

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