Last night, I watched a segment on new zealand television news about how there's a big problem with people in positions of management in that country who bully their employees. And now, the context behind a lot of new zealander body language is becoming clearer to me. There's definitely an attitude of timidity which would result from being bullied.

And given my other recent epiphanies about new zealand, I realize that the problem could be easily solved if people raised their kids differently. See this previous post of mine. Over the years, the next generation of kids would not learn those bad habits which involve overbearing and unkind attitudes towards those who they have authority over.

And given how simple this apparently wide-scale new zealand cultural problem is to solve, it got me thinking about problems I moan about every day in my own society in the usa. There are two problems which really weary me here. One is the immaturity of men, coupled with the lack of latitude given to men when it comes to expressing affection to children and youth. A man has to be very very cautious about his body language, and interactions around youth and children so that he can both bond with those kids, but also avoid looking like the stereotype people have in mind when they think about what we call a "pedophile." The answer, I realized this morning, is very simple - go out there and promote the values of man-child, and father-child bonding. It would take years, but if boys and male teens starting developing better bonds with adult men, the next generation of adult men would be a lot more mature and better socially adjusted than those of this generation are.

Another problem that I realized would actually be easy to solve is the "starving artist" problem. The answer here is for us who do aspire to high levels of skill with art or literature or whatever else to stop encouraging those who honestly do not to go into what would be for them a very unhappy lifestyle. For many years I tried to get my older brother into a lifestyle where he had more time for general skill building - I encouraged him to pick up videotography, and singing... things which were really my own aspirations and not his. Eventually he started pushing back. He frankly likes his high paying job as finance analyst working in the public sector for a major usa city. Myself, I would feel incredibly unfulfilled in that kind of job... but he apparently gets quite a high salary (he won't ever tell me for sure, so I don't know) and he has become an important benefactor so that I can have a stipend with which I can pay for living expenses, so that I have massive amounts of time for my own skill building endeavors. Yesterday, on New Zealand tv, I also saw a segment on an australian man who quaintly considers it art to grow an ear under the skin of his arm. It's a technological marvel, but certainly not an artistic marvel. And he should never have been talked into calling what he is doing "performance art."

What I see generally, is that those of us with large amounts of skill end up entering into an unhealthy social dynamic by how we choose our friends and our projects. For instance, I have spent years at reddit.com because I recognize that discussion board/link sharing site provides an opportunity for changing the winds of social trends in the english speaking world. However, the reason thoughtful independent thinkers have success with what we've done there, is exactly because it's a sour place. Most commenters and contributors do not take the place seriously at all. And that means that those of us who do, get the opportunity to have our ideas stand out very prominently in the conversations.

This is a similar thing to the effect of the "modern art movement" - a lot of rich people have bought into this vision - and they have come to support a speculation market, and art galleries. But honestly, is modern art good art? There's a very excellent effect on the world of visual art, which the modern art movement has. If you have simple abstract combinations of motifs lifted up and looked to as the summa cum laude expression of art - you are actually esteeming the studio excercise. This gives beginners in visual art a lot of self esteem as they pursue all those important excercises in their own studios. Consequently, our photography and graphic design in the West is really high quality. Every art museum becomes a school for aspiring artists - where they can study how folks develop their techniques.

But still we have the question, "is modern art good art"? And I would say it isn't, in and of itself (unless we're referring to the other meaning of art - a tradesperson's technique). The sentiment that has worked so well for the visual arts encourages bad trends in the performing arts - such as music, and film and stand up comedy. Our performing arts in the usa are frankly atrocious, and getting worse every decade. People take the idea of abstract art from the visual arts, and they sloppily adopt the idea that they need to encourage amateurism rather than encouraging excellence.

The upshot of the fact that those who pursue excellence in literature, like myself, gravitating towards reddit - or those who aspire to excellence in the performing arts lauding modern abstract visual art, is that you have an effect where those rich people cannot find us, when they want to contribute their resources to give folks opportunities who show promise in these art forms. They see that talented people are mixed up with the riff-raff who aren't taking their approach to art seriously. Therefore, those of us who would want to improve the quality of literature or performing art in the usa end up lacking the resources to be able do so (the more dedicated among us barely have the resources to pay our personal living expenses).