Opinion/Editorial

INSHORE HOLE

By James Strauss

Back a hundred years ago, when a man named Nicolai Tesla was revolutionizing the transmission of electrical power, among other things, he was interviewed about what was going to be discovered from his very special and solitary understanding of what electricity was. Back then nobody knew what it was. In fact, all this time later, scientists still only have a vague idea of what it is and how it really works. They know much more about the latter than the former. Tesla said that electricity, formally understood to be the movement of electrons up and down or over and back using a physical medium like a copper wire, was not that at all. In fact, he said that the current understanding at that time was all wrong. In response the man was denied fame, fortune and recognition, except for a later acceptance of his invention of alternating current that we all use today.

What did Tesla understand about the nature of electricity that nobody else seemed to get, including such powerhouse thinkers as Thomas Edison and Westinghouse? There’s little known about it. Without alternating current, however, the world would be a vastly different place today. What special knowledge and ability did this basically uneducated genius possess?

He wasn’t stuck. His mind had not absorbed bad data that secured it to a set of mental railroad tracks leading to nowhere. There is much talk today of dot-com billionaires and start up entrepreneurs who claim to have succeeded because they did not go to college or stay in college to ‘clutter up’ their minds. Some argue that this is the way to go, that this method of learning by doing instead of by example is the only way to really succeed without family or other financial support. Others, and there are many more others, believe that the uneducated path to success or even fulfillment should be called deliberate ignorance. There is no question that deliberate ignorance in many areas will lead to failure or even death. If you’ve never heard of electricity or high voltage for example, then stopping by to grab a swinging power line dangling down from a tower after a storm is very likely to fatally end any chance of ever learning, inventing or succeeding at anything. Nonetheless, there is a very difficult and complex argument over the value of deliberate ignorance, and it is going on throughout all countries considered part of modern civilization, and many not yet at that level of development. Some religious zealots use deliberate ignorance to build followings. Some military advisors use the same tool to build armies.

Advanced education is just what it sounds like. Education is, for the most part, merely the acquisition of knowledge gathered through hard fought discovery and testing to arrive at conclusions that make sense for the human condition. The education system used in most developed countries also requires that the person acquiring the knowledge be tested, and then demonstrate their understanding by repeating it back. Seldom does having knowledge about something preclude one’s ability to have independent creative thoughts. In the newer fields of information technology, innovation many times comes in areas where there is no prior knowledge, other than how to operate systems and machinery.

What’s really going on when it comes to creative considerations? An inshore hole, when discussed in terms of wave and beach situations, is a special condition where large waves beating on the shore carve out a lengthy tube-like area of deep water between where the water washes up on the beach, and then out to where the waves are breaking a bit of a distance out. The water in this “hole” swishes around, and back and forth, to an extent that when a swimmer is caught there he or she can neither go out, nor go back to shore. The situation is called being caught in an inshore hole.

We can so easily have our minds caught by the mental waters of inshore holes. Information comes at us from several directions and many times it is utterly diverse in content and amount. These mental inshore holes, as opposed to the real water ones in the seas, can also be artificially created. Our minds can be caused to spin endlessly using fraudulent, erroneous or false data. The recent financial meltdown of the entire United States (the mortgage bubble and stock market crash) is a perfect example of this kind of induced ‘inshore hole.’ More often however, humans input data that is not presented to them or experienced for the expressed purpose of fooling them or taking money or even affection. Things happen and humans experience it. The more experience and learning a person has, the more likely that the person will not get stuck in one of these holes.

America’s educational system, all the way from kindergarten up to graduate school has long been known for it’s rigid integrity of data. America’s entire scientific community in every area of endeavor is disproportionately characterized by honesty, arduously applied testing and peer agreed upon conclusions. To believe one is on one’s own when it comes to inputting information (and so avoiding the benefits of formal training and education) is a recipe for complete silent disaster. Why silent? Because people who decide they can ‘make it on their own’ and therefore avoid learning from those people and things that have gone before will be unheralded, while the very few who actually lead a profitable start up or dot com will be celebrated for their ability for having done it alone, and having done it by not ‘cluttering’ up their minds with past data and life experience.

Swimmers overcome the deadly effects of inshore holes by analyzing the situation, moving with the roiling waters, and then escaping out one side of the offshore phenomenon or the other. Their escape is not normally a result of figuring out the water’s movement and reacting accordingly. Usually, they get out because they remember being taught or having read about such situations. Inshore holes of the mind must be treated the same way when encountered out in the social order we all swim in. Today’s highly charged political race for the presidency can serve as a most excellent example. If you listen to a candidate speaking to you in the media and sounding like a dictator, a racist, a solver of impossibly complex problems with simplistic answers, then you can avoid an ‘inshore hole’ of the mind by studying leaders of the past who’ve preached the very same messages and the outcome of their implemented rhetoric, if it was implemented, before you make your decision.
~ James Strauss