Rand's Virtue of the Individual

When I was younger, I was really into philosophy and spent a lot of my free time researching different philosophical ideas and debating them with my best friend. In time, I began to realize what Karl Marx had realized and summarized well in his 1845 11 Theses of Feuerbach: "Philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however is to change it." In all my study of philosophy and history and theory, while I had, perhaps, come to understand a little better my own identity and my place in the world, I had done nothing to change the world or influence it for good. I began a long journey of discovery and application that I strive to carry on today.

One of the most influential writers in terms of my understanding of taking action and the power of one to create change is Ayn Rand. I began reading The Fountainhead when I was about fifteen, perhaps more so because it had been recommended to me by a girl that I really liked, but I got down to reading it immediately and fell in love with some of the themes and ideas presented therein. Since then, I've grown out of a number of Rand's ideas, but The Fountainhead remains, in my mind, an apotheosis of the human spirit, championing the value of the individual, the virtue of pure art, the power of the word, and the treasure of innovation. Rand encourages her readers to break away from stale and unfeeling orthodoxy in creating, to be true to one's own personal vision in denying the structured arbitrariness of conventional thought. The Fountainhead really was life-changing in helping me to realize my own power to create and innovate, and it's a great read as a whole.

"Opening a Vein"

I had a little realization moment tonight as I was reading in preparation for my writing course. My professor messaged me asking me for the source of a quote that I had posted, and I followed the original source link only to find out that the referenced document was part of an exclusive academic collection to which I was denied access. One of the student authors of Writing about Literature in the Digital Age talked about what I like to think of as an academic aristocracy, wherein only the intelligentsia, the scholars, have access to literature. He said that despite the clear abundance of literature and analysis of said literature, a minuscule proportion of it is actually accessible to the general public; the rest remains dormant, locked away in the cold of subscription-only academic databases and in the dark of dusty drawers in old, gray filing cabinets. The best thing about writing is the humanity in it, and if we take that away, then there's no purpose in it. Literature is not great because is has lots of words or lots of good phrases but because it resounds within the human soul and causes us to realize ourselves a little bit better than we previously have. Literature is not a dispassionate, selfish requirement to put words on paper but is rather like "opening a vein," to quote Hemingway, putting a piece of yourself out there for others to poke and prod and understand and love or hate. You have to make yourself a little bit vulnerable for it to really work. And the world, it's not just a filing cabinet, apathetic towards its contents and unconcerned but is rather a living, breathing organism that grows and changes and is fed by print and passion. The call of the writer is to express, however clumsily, the yearning and the turning of the human soul, to capture in words an emotion, a thought, a realization. We have to take what we see and what we feel and what we know and share it. 
Because in the end, the beauty of a song in not in just knowing it but in singing it for others to hear.

Streams of Thought and Creation

I've always thought of art as something beyond us all, something that exists independently. It is a twisting, shimmering stream of endless feeling and beauty and understanding and passion from which all great artists have quaffed and from which all innovators and creators draw their substance. It is not so much that an artist truly creates; rather, he dips his brush in the waters of the soul and paints blue deserts and purple trees or hears the song that flows through every living bring and captures just a few notes of it -- not enough to truly know the song, but enough to remind us of the song that we once knew and the song that we will yet one day sing.

The Education-Innovation Paradox

I've thought a bit about a question posed in Writing about Literature in the Digital Age, a free e-book produced by BYU students under the direction of Professor Gideon Burton. How do you keep education legitimate while encouraging creativity and innovation?

The answer can really be summed up in a few words, I think, but I'm going to answer it in a few more than a few words. The purpose of education, in the end, is not to teach facts -- encyclopedias and wikis can do that; it's not to prepare us for careers -- we learn a whole lot of things that have absolutely no application to what we end up doing in the end, and most jobs provide training to help us to understand and master necessary skills; it's not about socializing us, though that is certainly an effect, be it positive or negative; and it's not to teach us what to think. The purpose of education is to teach us how to think and to give us the resources necessary to be able to engage ourselves in lifelong learning. I think sometimes teachers forget that, and that's perhaps the greatest detriment to student creativity and innovation. Sure, you have to study your classics and your theory, but you have to understand more so why they are classics and to whose theories are you ascribing. I wish sometimes that the educational system was a bit less institutionalized, because there sure are a lot of square, flat cookies coming out of the oven where they might have otherwise been perfectly wonderful stars or dinosaurs. The quest for discovery and innovation, however, must begin within each individual and must extend into every corner of our lives. We must become learners and seekers, and to misquote Mark Twain, 'we shouldn't let our schooling stand in the way of our education.' Especially in this digital age, truth is an open book (or e-book) before us, and we need to browse but a moment to realize the wonders that surround us and the wonders yet awaiting.

Facebook: Giving the Face Back to the People

Included below is a research paper that my good friend, Jacob Trotter, has graciously allowed me to share with you. It investigates the influence of Facebook and other social media sites in forming a sort of collective knowledge base that allows for the creation of a truly representative, web-based democratic ideal. Jacob delves into the Israeli-Iranian conflicts and the Arab Spring revolutions, indicating that nonviolent use of social media sites has resulted in their becoming "great mobilizers of people and promoters of political change." Jacob emphasizes that through social media sites, "[w]e will see true democracies arise as each citizen acquires an active voice in their communities (sic)." I am still very new to the whole digital media revolution, but I feel strongly that as we come to understand and embrace modern digital media, we can truly become movers and shakers in a world very much so in need of positive change.

Click "Read more" to expand the full research paper.

I will sleep tomorrow if it means that I can dream tonight...

I've only been to class once so far, and yet I feel that my mind is being unlocked, that I am being set free from some strange mental shackles which have bound my mind for a while now. I feel some of the passion returning, and though tomorrow I will likely envy those that now rest their heads on downy pillows and drift away into downy dreams, I don't feel like I can go to bed tonight -- not yet, at least. Anne Morrow Lindbergh said that "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after,” and while I've never before had coffee, I'm beginning to understand better her sentiment.

I have a bunch of pages full of quotes and ideas and thoughts about what I've been reading from Writing About Literature in the Digital Age, and I've got no idea where to start, so I guess I'll just start...

In my Eng295 class, we've been talking a bit about the BYU-Idaho Learning Model, which is a three-step system intended to help students dig deeper throughout the learning process. I was pretty interested in this, as it coincides pretty nicely with some of my own ideas on learning. Basically, the program centers around the ideas of preparation, peer instruction, and application. It centers around integrating the things that we learn in class into our lives and into the lives of those around us. In other words, it's not so much about learning as it is about living according to the truths that we discover and helping others to find meaning and application in those same truths.

The model talks about three areas of preparation: spiritual, individual, and group. For those of a religious background, the idea of spiritual preparation is probably pretty clear: the Bible is full of verses stating that the Spirit will teach us all things. But for those still unsure about religion, what does it mean to prepare spiritually? Well, part of that is looking for answers to questions that are important to you, questions that will help you to become a better person and to fill in the gaps in your understanding of the world and of humanity. Another part is being in a condition that will allow us to focus on learning and discovery. After all, it's hard to read – not to mention critically analyze writing – when you're drunk or listening to crazy punk screamo.