Aphorism #12: The True Source of Greatness
Thesis: greatness has always emerged where the noise is thinner.
The glory that was Greece emerged at the fringes of the civilised world, whose centre lay far east in Babylon and Persepolis. Christianity emerged at the edge of the Roman Empire; America at the edge of European civilisation; China, at the edge of the West.
The umbilical connecting the edges to the centre provides nourishment, but at a distance that enables novelty—evolution.
The closer you get to the centre, the higher the stakes (cost of living, competition with peers getting ahead). There is more opportunity, but at the cost of mimetic overload. Disconnection from the centre is Lilliputia.
But that umbilical connection to the centre, being fed by it without drowning in it, that is a sweet spot.
Bo Burnham’s Inside, written by a man who had enough success to afford to step back and enough connection to have the knowledge to make a masterpiece.
Antithesis: the scenius.
Greatness emerges where the stew is thickest. The songs poured out of Dylan “like ticker tape” when he was living in Greenwich Village surrounded by the booming folk scene. Paris was the beating heart of the Socialist theory’s golden age in the mid-to-late-19th century: Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Engels. At the same time, in the Café Guerbois, you could find Renoir, Baudelaire, Zola chewing the fat over wine and cheese with regular pop-ins from Monet.
Fast forward to the early 20th century, and it was the heart of the Lost Generation: Joyce, his assistant Beckett and his bulldog Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Matisse, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, Nabokov and Edith Wharton.
Wind the clocks back to Florence in the 16th century, and Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, and many, many more could be found (thanks to the Medici, of course).
Vienna in the early 20th century was the place to be for philosophy. This is where the Vienna Circle birthed logical positivism. At the same time, it was the beating heart of nascent psychoanalysis—Freud, Adler, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Viktor Frankl. Vienna was where it was happening.
Circuitously, this brings us back to our original point: Jung was at the fringes of this centre; the umbilical was feeding him all the way up in Zurich. His connection gave him rich new theory and social energy; his distance gave him enough space to go his own way.
Philosophy was born in the fringes of Ionia but matured with Socrates in Athens.
Synthesis: unclear.
For seismic shifts, perhaps distance is required; for the steam which drives the train, proximity may be preferable. Cost of living may be a key factor: Greenwich Village was a bit of a dive, meanwhile, the Medici in Florence and the Sun King in France were patrons who created gravity with their lavish support.
There’s more than one way to make a genius.
Makes me feel good about my decision to stay in Puerto Rico, my country. It's part of the fringe of the American empire.
So we have one cat who taught himself to play my harp's bass strings with his teeth, and another who's only ever approached the harp because he's seen his brother's success with the instrument. The latter boy does tend to want what the other cats want, to such a degree that he'll abandon his own fresh breakfast to try and steal the first bite off the breakfasts of the others. Then there's the harper cat. What's the opposite of mimetic desire? The boy is driven from within like no cat I've ever known, but in addition to that he is repulsed by any overly saturated scene. If the other cats learned to play, he'd either ditch the harp or dramatically change his technique, no question. If Dumpster Diamond touches Aquila's breakfast, that's the end of Aquila's appetite. But there is a scene that is saturated just to his liking; saturated in the mimetic desire of the lady cats in the hood to come for an up-close hour-long gaze at him through the glass of his bay window. He tolerates that very well and very generously. On some days it borders on full-time employment. If the layer of glass between them was dissolved, however, he'd be whatever direction out of there is in. But I think Jung would've stayed with the trouble. Maybe his pipe was his layer of glass.