I’ve been playing with a draft of a longer post for several months now. The post is about curiosity as the master impulse behind all human progress and good things. It’s also about how every dominant belief and political structure are optimized as the antithesis of curiosity. Curiosity is the greatest threat to concentrated power and prestige, so those who have power and prestige labor endlessly to create the mind-killing opposite of all curiosity. Consensus. Obedience. Being seen as “normal”, “in the know”, “respectable”.
Curiosity doesn’t care about reputations and rules. That’s why it’s the only impulse with the power to cut through the human bullshit matrix and create progress and discovery.
The least respectable ideas often have more curiosity behind them than the most respected. It doesn’t make the specific ideas any better or more true, but you can be sure that the curious impulse behind wacky ideas is more beneficial to humanity than the obedient prestige-seeking behind consensus.
We’ll see if I ever finish this larger article. I rarely write anything longer than a thousand words. But there’s so much to say about the unpredictable power of raw curiosity unencumbered by the need to be seen as serious.