Don't get your finger cut off!

When doing art school in the early 90s, we learned about power dynamics through a Foucauldian lens and were introduced to “conspiratorial” ideas like the CIA supported movements like abstract expressionism. This was believed to be an effort to shift cultural influence from Europe and Russia to the US, especially during the early days of the Cold War. This was all about shifting power and so-called cultural / moral authority. By the early nineties, visual arts institutions had become frontrunners of the prevailing left cultural zeitgeist that’s more in discussion today. My point is that conspiracy theories, whether speculative or factual, aren't confined to a particular political stance. There seems to be a misleading divide, not necessarily between left and right, but between those who believe everything is a conspiracy and those who dismiss all such theories as absurd. These are only beliefs and viewpoints that often close off genuine dialogue and examination of evidence. I’m led to believe that doesn’t serve real progress at all - if that’s what we’re looking to promote.

And it’s easy to lump people or things into categories and attribute psychological qualities. We can say governments, for example, have messed up big time as a group. But what do we even mean by that? No matter how much we try to slap labels like 'UK Government' or 'Google' or ‘Republican’ or whatever on groups of diverse people, or say that a business is the same as a person, at the end of the day, these are just ideas in our heads. Same thing goes for countries – they're just ideas we've made up and lines drawn on a map. Sure these terms are helpful to simplify how we communicate about complex stuff but companies, ideologies, countries - they are all our mental constructs.

And we cling to these constructs so much so that we're willing to go to war and hurt each other for them. It's this type of thinking that can lead to some really terrible stuff. It's sad and doesn't need a small group of people controlling everything to happen. It's possibly more about our own past traumas leading us to feel perpetually unsafe, and how it plays out with most of us trying to find a group to belong to, whether it's our country, our politics, or any other belief system. And while we're all stuck in this mindset, who's to say that people aren't going to try to take advantage of that? To me, it's not just possible, it's pretty much a given, and it results in us all being actually unsafe in a real sense. We get into all other kinds of mental knots!

Take that phrase 'conspiracy theory' - it has become a broad pejorative for many explanations. Some plain mad, some much less so and some even with reason. But let's think about it: can powerful people sometimes make decisions in secret? And can they get enough corroboration from others in power to make those decisions work on a large scale? If that's true, would those decisions be made to benefit them more than the people they impact? If we’re saying 'no way' or 'never' to all these points, I'd have to ask what kind of proof we’ve got to back that up. Same deal if we’re saying 'yes' to all of it and always so. So everyone in a position of authority and responsibility is conspiring against us? Does it have to be all that black and white? I’d expect there’s a lot of more of grey areas here too! We can surely come up with better ideas - that is better theories about the world.

It takes me back to my art school days again! We had this book, 'Painting as Model.' It was all about how art represents different ways of existing in the world, or basically different mindsets. The problem is really in our mindsets that limit how we might approach models of reality in smarter ways. It’s not only the models themselves but how we interpret them and make tangible decisions.

I like the word 'model,' too. A model helps us understand complexity without claiming to represent everything. It's like a model airplane – it gives us a scaled-down version we can hold, but it's not the real thing. Models are never are what they point towards, after all. Getting attached to them misses the point.

There are these cool stories from Eastern philosophy about pointing. One talks about not confusing the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself. Another tells of students asking their master about enlightenment, and the master answers by raising a finger. When a student later copies this gesture, the master cuts off their finger, leading to an enlightenment realisation in the student.

The moral's the same, really. When we get too hung up on a particular model, an expression of what others might have grasped at a certain time, we miss the real lesson. It's not about the model or the finger pointing to the moon; it's about seeing the moon with our own eyes. Too often, though, we end up just staring at someone’s finger and / or arguing that all the other fingers pointing - are wrong!