Crown of Antlers

I imagine our world made up of two: the one perceived and the world at work. The world at work is understood through collective perception. The world perceived is unique in that it is the subjective experience of the world collectively experienced. The world at work is what we'd call "practical," while the other would be called something else as it is different for each person.

To create definitions and statements for both, a lexicon of metaphors are used. These metaphors come from a basic mode of senses. You know them as the five senses. The concept can be observed well in wine tasting where testers both subjectively and collectively describe flavor in an array of referential experiences. Saying that something tastes like marshmellows cannot be understood without having smelled and enjoyed a marshmellow; however, if the language for the description had been established prior, someone may be able to say something has the taste of marshmellow without ever having experienced one due to the collective experience that makes up the metaphoric lexicon.

You may not recall a time when you couldn't count past a certain number, but I do. A teacher tells a pupil that two and two makes four, without showing the student a number line or the history of math. The student is bright and grasps onto the concept of arithmetic without understanding the theory of numbers. The student knows that 1 is a basic "counting unit," so this student makes long numeric treks to make numbers like 213 and 241 make 454. Like the person who says something tastes like marshmellows without experiencing one, that student knows math, at least as far he or she can count, until more knowledge is learned from later experience and teaching.

Believe it or not, 1 is not the most basic unit of counting, nor is the concept 0 obvious. They require either assumptions or a lot of experience. Fortunately education hopefully provides us with that collective experience. Through education, we learn the concept of none and later its philosophical problems. Sometimes when learning, we must relearn or shed away assumptions to understand deeper ideas.

What I found the most confounding aspect of education, however, was the notion that someone was smarter than another. For a long time, I admitted to not being so smart, and I got along fine until people in late grade school were suddenly calling me "smart." With a new title, I felt empowered and tried to take ownership of this name. But I wondered what it meant to be smart. I had thought -- that when someone smarter than me called me smart, I must be smart. And since I had thought any person besides me was smarter than me, then if I were to be ever called smart, then it must indeed be true. You should be able to see, these were great odds. I was destined to be smart. What a relief.

My next lesson was in middle school, where I learned that people were not always equal at all times. Rules were no longer a following guide, as both adult and peer seemed to follow none. And so without rules to follow or lessons to learn (well), middle school sorta became this place where people made up their minds on morality. Here too, I was called smart. The word was different now. I no longer felt as if intelligence could be taken for granted. It was earned.

In college, while I studied computer science, humanities, and worked in IT, I focused on my studies, organizations, volunteering, and many hours of work. The concept of fairness etched itself into my brain: if I work very hard now, I will be rewarded. People will see my work. They will see my work. What a disappointment the workforce brought. And I now see why so many college students work in service industries. It was here, senior year, where I learned that intelligence is neither bought or earned, it was given to you as a gift.

Words have power that give and take. When a farmer creates a sling to support a cow's weight while it went outside to graze independent, he or she is called clever. If a Harvard drop-out makes a website using PHP, a well-established programming language, he is named a genius. (Yes, I am talking about Zucker.) For measuring a person's life or intelligence, it does not matter how much effort that agent puts into a life, it matters how much someone else will value it. People value things not because they are beautiful or good things but because their selfish motives determine that such things should be valuable.

This barrier in value judgment prevents society from recognizing genius as much as it points it towards the right direction. Society does not concern itself with the truth. It is difficult to say what essentially it concerns itself with, perhaps the self. What then in a selfishly driven society has the most value? It must be the personal attributes that make up a life: your meal times, your health, your life's story, etc. make up your personal character. These attributes are shared with a few people, and so the knowledge of your life is valuable as it is scarce.

Cherish what is personal, either be it yours or someone else's.