At the recent Ars Electronica symposium among many wonderful things I saw there, two out-of-the-ordinary things happened. I re-encountered the person that once told me most civilly that he h*ted me , and I also came in touch with a younger version of myself.
When you are young, sometimes in order to find truth the only way is to negate everything around you. In other words, in order to be right, sometimes you really have to ascribe everything (that is not you) as wrong. And then something happens later on in life, where you realize that the surrounding world wasn't wrong at all. And that you weren't wrong either. The act of questioning is a powerful educational tool that we can attribute to "The Man" but perhaps it's more accurately simply a wonderful part of the natural programming inscribed in we hu-mans.
To be wrong, or to be told that you are wrong, is an important cleansing force in our extremely robust ecosystem of knowledge. If you're always right by the power of scientific fact, then well ... that's kind of boring. It means you're done. Finished. Can disappear. But. You can start over again. So that's not bad either. Perhaps many wrongs, do make a right after all. I may certainly be wrong. I can live with that.
Posted by maeda at September 4, 2006 09:17 AM