Creative Call To Arms
Taste is incredibly rare, while ignorance and idiocy are wholly abundant.
If you have good taste, pay attention and are intelligent, you are especially rare.
As such, it is your duty to do whatever you can to bring about good, intelligent, tasteful creations into this world.
The world has enough tack, trash and tedium — it’s teeming with the stuff.
How will you know if you’re intelligent? Foresight. If you have enough foresight and presence of mind to see things coming, more often than you fall victim to events — you’re probably smart.
Another clue is if you’re bored by what’s popular.
If you’re currently struggling to find what’s great, look to the past, look to the classics.
History has a way of sieving through the dross, and presenting art so often neglected in their times — left behind in the dregs, or in the gutter while shinola did glisten and blind the masses.
In time, the great stuff rises to the top and the rest falls away.
Good taste, and good stuff can be hard to find, but intelligence will help seek it out. Go looking. Don’t settle for what’s put in front of you.
It’ll be hard, but the nourishment you’ll get from great stuff will be worth it.
Remember, you’re not alone, but know you are rare.
Intelligent, thoughtful people that also create are even rarer.
Most intelligent people settle for devouring what crumbs of greatness they can find.
This is not enough.
If you can create something, anything, and you have taste, intelligence and patience — you can’t help but create something good after trying, painstakingly, to do so.
Don’t let perfectionism, that fascist, that narcissist, lead you astray. You must make crap first. Everyone does. But, once in a blue moon, you’ll come good. You’ll make something worthy of the world.
If you don’t try, others still will — without taste, without thought, without merit.
Don’t let that be our only output.
Save us from mediocracy, and from ourselves.
Get to work.
We, the world, need you.
Tomorrow’s too late. Today is too.
But it’s a start.
Go!
