Spirit

Rediscovered this song which I love. It seems that spirit/soul is rare now. Maybe that's why vampires and zombies have been romanticized so much in pop culture to reflect our neglect of meaning and inspiration. Starting with school, we enter a society based mainly on mass management. For a normal orderly society, we conform, learn how to be normal until we discover no one is really normal.

For that which is most special is by definition not ordinary so therefore not normal. But our factory-like social design pulls us to reject the extra-ordinary to make room for predictable and safe society. Sounds reasonable except when societal direction is wrong.

When what is correct is defined by what the masses believe, we could end up jumping off a bridge just because everyone else is. If you look at the equations below, most are based on physical world experiment. They have led engineers to develop good and bad products that define our technological age.

The last one is about investment. Hedge funds, derivatives, more and more convoluted financial instruments are based on the probability theories which are useful for studying trends in nature, but are now used to predict the future. So what is normal now becomes the direction of investment and development. It is just hidden in "sophisticated" words and calculations.

The abnormal is needed for change. Human nature tends to resist change by embracing what worked yesterday to secure tomorrow. But this ignores the environment, learning and new information,

Most algorithmic studies tend to continue this trend of framing what we know today as standards. Even software for marketing and translation takes the most common to predict what is correct.

When our common belief is wrong as we were when we thought the Sun revolved around earth, or that our world is flat, or that our leader is a god... we really are just following the folly of crowds.

The spirit, the soul, the extra-ordinary that drives us to passion is the best of our humanity. Not normalcy.