Big Macs are bad for you...in more ways than you might think
The nice thing about fast food is that I can walk into any MacDonald's in the country, and my burger will taste the same in Washington as it will in Michigan, or any of the other states. This is probably the single greatest factor in the appeal of such places. The problem with that is that a Big Mac will also as likely to kill you in Washington a it is will in Michigan. Just bcause you can get someting the same way, doesn't make it a good thing. An attractive veneer of sameness may be a cover for a culture of decayed imagination.
Let's talk a second about the ability to imagine powerfully in a culture which conditions us to accept a factory stamped version of reality, shall we?
Why is it, that when we find ourselves confronted by a product of genuine imagination and creativity, that we can scarce walk away unchanged by it? Is it that it's cool? Probably not, since the things which usually carry the label of cool are often the result of an industry (publishing, music, film, etc...) which seeks to mass produce attractive product based on waves of consumer interest. Oh, Vampires are in right now? Let's reward people who can generate skads of material about sparkly vampires and in so doing, milk the consumer of their dollars.
This is the driving force behind popular culture. It may have been that there was an original, imaginitive, creative iteration of something, but it soon gets buried in a pile of facsimilies which are only the shadows of imagination and creativity.
This is about control. Who can control the market by inundating it with what is popular, and thus wrest control from someone else's hands? Sameness controls by limiting understading of possibilities. It only allows us to see Option A or Option B.
What imagination does, is to provide a work whose effect is to break the spell of sameness and to awaken us to other possibilities. "Wait," it says, "but there's also Options C through Z." When confronted with Imagination we are shaken out of the sleep of sameness so that we can see a broader spectrum of reality than we could before.
Sameness is motivated by reductionism, which is at its core a celbration of ignorance. Reductionism reduces understanding of reality to simplistic. This means it must by necessity choose to ignore aspects of reality's complexity...hence "ignorance."
The difference between Control and Discipline
Imagination however, does not rely on an impulse to control others, but to have self-control, to be disciplined in your chosen medium of creation. Self-control, or discipline, is necessary to imagination because if we are not aware and in control of ourselves and the ways in which we produce within our chosen mediums, we will default to whatever firstcomes to mind...which is almost always a replication of something we've already seen, heard, experienced from somewhere else (i.e. it will not be our own but a shadow of someone else's work).
Creativity and Imagination, then, are not most often about free spirited, uninhibited creation or production because these things without self-control will generate more and more sameness. They will lack skill and refinement. hey will be untrained.
This is the opposite of someone who is practiced and seems to produce something on a wim when in fact they are producing out of years of training and experience which has given them a sort of "second nature," as we call it.
Lack of discipline and skill appreciates sameness because it is easy to digest and requires little effort to understand...because it's shallow. Reductionism breeds a culture of low value.
Be Imaginitive
Why try to be imaginative? Because if we don't, we lose something: vibrant humanity. If you've ever taken a look at our culture and been appalled at the character traits you've seen in it, it's not because people have no morals. People have no morals because they have shrunken imaginations that demand sameness, which in turn breeds selfishness, which in turn breeds skillessness, which breeds more and more sameness, etc.
A powerful imagination is required to wake ourselves and others from the slumber of "blah" life. And when we wake and look around we'll see the decay in the imagination of our culture and be made sick by it. But, in doing so, we'll be motivated to do somethin by it...to imagine deeply and subvert and destroy the brokenness around us, to be replaced by vibrant and creative expressions of goodness.
Didn't you kow that what you create matters?
You do now.
