Another post from Patrice Ayme

Patrice, not his real name, lives in France. He is a thinker but also a communicator. Thank goodness! For many of Patrice’s blog posts are superb. Like this one ….

ooOOoo

No Tribe, No Vibe… Thrive With The Herd, Think Like The Herd: Not The Easiest Way To Advance Wisdom

By Patrice Ayme, June 15th, 2024.

Tribal effects are dominant, in all fields of thinking, even in the hardest sciences, logic, math, theoretical physics. It took more than three centuries for Buridan’s concept of momentum to finally rule… Among the top thinkers.

So a particular analysis is only relative to what a particular tribe will tolerate… And this is true all over, especially in so-called analytic philosophy. I recently found a (very!) unexpected effect in Relativity (by using Relativity in an unusual way). Instead of rejoicing and inquiring, the main Relativity site immediately blocked and canceled me. No debate. Never mind that I obviously knew Relativity better than most on that site. I was removed because I had not followed “the rules” … which apparently are that all what is officially known in Relativity as an Einstein cult is all there is to know.

Once I gave a physics seminar at Stanford, on Black Holes, and I prepared it with what I hoped was profound thought. Grave error. I was excoriated for showing the obvious: no good predictions without a better understanding of Quantum Mechanics. 20 years later, everybody was doing that, including the (world top) luminaries in attendance 20 years earlier. 

The effect seems ubiquitous. The most creative thinkers have to be iconoclasts, and iconoclast thinkers are hated by the tribe for breaking their icons… Until great priests of the tribe (or, more craftily, their students) steal said ideas and make them their own… The best example of this is Relativity, 99% developed by Poincaré and his associates, stolen by Einstein. Poincaré, although the world’s top mathematician, and discoverer of E = mcc, and the rest of Relativity had one problem: he belonged not just to the French tribe, but was part of a family keen to resist further German invasion… His cousin was Raymond Poincaré, the President of the French Republic, fiercely opposed to German domination. .  

So why do people do what they do? Generally to get power, be it just the power of clothing, a roof, food and consideration. And what provides all this? A tribe.

No tribe, no vibe…

So then what? Any time an idea surfaces, the first question of the most profound, hence most independent thinker, should be the idea’s tribal localization. 

If an idea has no tribal origin, it has a much better chance to be new. Conversely, ideas which are like flags should often best be… flagged down…  But some will object, where is wisdom in all this? Wisdom? What is it? The etymological root of the concept (etymology means logic of the truth…) of wisdom is to see, hence to know… The tribe has seen all there was to see, with its thousands of eyes. To see more, to see what was not seen yet… One has to go, where one didn’t go yet, or to be, what nobody was yet… or taste what had not been tasted yet (the origin of sap, hence sapiens, and sage, sagesse…)

Tribes may have the vibes, and the wiles, but also dumb down beautiful minds.

Patrice Ayme

We got to own this world, one idea at a time. And all of these ideas were born once, in one human mind, and no more than that. Thriving tribes may have the vibes and the wiles, but they never found the smarts.

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Of course I left a comment on Patrice’s blog. This is what I said,

It is 0430 in Oregon and I have just read your essay out to Jeannie. That was after reading it quietly myself.

It is profound. And it leads me on to thinking about the future, as in the next ten years. For recently a weather scientist (name forgotten) said that the peoples of Planet Earth have just ten years to reduce our emissions of, primarily, CO2 or we go past a global tipping point.

Just ten years! Not much time for a global tribe to pickup the vibe of this scientist and run with it. We require a global democracy so we can eschew our governments and get to work, now!

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