experiences, perspective, and donuts

Psycho Donuts from jan hardee on Vimeo.

Jan Hardee and team of students have covered the above debate between owners of Psycho Donuts and the mental health groups protesting their business. Appropriately enough, I'm always back and forth on the idea of taking a stance. The dynamic is fascinating, in the sense that the logic goes roughly like this:

#1: You have a background or personal connection to some idea, feeling, or perspective, whether it's a political ideology, standard, or idea of how things should be. For the purposes of these thoughts, it doesn't matter what this thing is. The only important part is that it's personal.

#2: It's personal because of your experiences. Generally speaking the most meaningful perspectives come from the most meaningful experiences, and in a lot of cases this points to the way you grew up or the things you've been exposed to throughout life. Again, it doesn't matter what these things are. In this particular case it's mental illness but we could be talking about a deeply passionate attraction for guys in F-450's and mud boots. (for the record, I've been in the South far too long.) 

#3 Taking a stance on things reflects the resulting strong need we all have to express who we are and the things that are important to us. Because of all the above, it's deeply important that we exercise this.

#4 and this is critical: If we had a different set of experiences, we would of course have a completely different set of perspectives, different set of opinions, different set of stances, and ultimately a different set of things that we care to define ourselves with. There's something to be said for understanding perspectives and opinions in anyone simply as the result of these experiences, an extraordinary amount of which is entirely outside of their (and our own) control.

#5: The fascinating part of course being that we inevitably have to completely ignore this fact, for the sake of our own individuality. On some very important levels, the practice of understanding other perspectives and having perspectives of our own is completely impossible.

So where does that leave debates like the above? Is it ethical to market something in a way that offends any group or subset of people? Is there a way to account in advance for these kinds of differences in perspective? 

universal truths, perspective, and the resulting paradox

As I was crafting my Google Profile, I wrote out a few things that I've come to believe in. I believe in a few core things. I believe universal truths never change, only our understanding of them. I believe that all rules exist for a reason - when (and only when) you understand those reasons, you have the power to break them. I believe that the rules that govern human behavior are no different. I believe nostalgia is a lot more meaningful than we realize - so much of our understanding of the world and the beliefs we hold about it are shaped by the experiences we truly miss. I believe that the idea of the Eternal September reflects an eternal human paradox - our simultaneous longing for and resentment of own naive pasts.

These things are all assertions of universal truths in themselves. This is tricky because as I was remembering earlier today, so much of what we understand to be truths are founded solely on perspective. Change your perspective on something, and you change your understanding of it's true nature. Drastically. And of course, the relevant philosophical question is: "do universal truths really exist?"

I remember having one of those high school discussions about it, back at that time when you had to have a passionate opinion about everything, lest you weren't intelligent enough to "know all the issues." The social task at hand was to place yourself squarely on the side of either Universal Truth or Mutable Reality.

Do you guys still fall on one side or the other? What are the things you passionately beleive in? Can a change in perspective affect the truth of those ideas? More importantly: should it matter?

mashups, perspective, and creativity

What makes a good bootleg? The best and most compelling mashups aren't just A+B, two songs smashed together or even two songs put together that match acoustically. It's when two songs come together to give you an entirely new perspective that a true mashup is born. Madonna and the News does this, 99 Luft Balloons nails it, Yeah Yeah Yeah I Want Your Love, and scores of other greats.

When asked to drill down to humor's core, comedians will tell you that there are just two simple ingredients: recognition, and perspective. Audiences first recognize something being referenced, then it's made funny by giving it some new perspective. That's it.

So I think the best tech mashups aren't too different. Yesterday I ran into @jonwheatly's Twitority. Simple in that all it does is search Twitter but adds new perspective to the results, filtering by the number of followers the users making each statement have.

In some important ways, that's all creativity is: looking at something existing in a new way. We shouldn't ask anything more complicated out of truly great ideas. What's the great/simple/creative idea you've run into recently?