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 Recently I read the book Embracing Hope, based on a lecture that Victor Frankl had given in October 1984. Lots of good takeaways--one that stood out for me was, "Only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals, but also only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This is what distinguishes the community from a mere collective or even "the masses"." We see social media as a community but it has turned into a collectivism. The way collectivism works is that you take something simple, like a shared view of something--that a car is red. We can see it as a different shade of red but we agree that it is red. In in a community we can operate on that level, but in the peripheral areas of the community is collectivism. Once we leave the community we return to ourselves as individuals and think about what has happened in the community and construct different individual views, which can become the collective views so as to verify our own thinking as being true. You can join a group that is in essence a community, but it's really more of a collective, like bands. They are communities of course, but they start to turn into collectives or tribes that splinter off from them.

It's interesting today on October 1st I was reading through my diary and there was an entry about looking at looking, so it's an interesting coincidence that I was thinking about those two things. There was a photo that I took on October 1st, titled "Necker Cube", an image of the edge of a building (The MCA in Chicago) against storm clouds in the distance. You can look at it two ways: you could see it as a building in the foreground with clouds in the background, or the reverse where it looks like a body of water that's on an edge. So there's the community shared vision that it could be either/or, or the collective vision that it's one or the other. Artists are interesting because they see the world in that alternate view, which is what motivates them to see things differently--I think in a more healthy way, perhaps more in the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is probably more inclined to be collectivist rather than communitarian. Community arises from the right hemisphere. We can have a shared vision and we can agree on that, but there are different variations of that shared vision. That's where politics comes into the picture. So politics aren't really about community--it's about collectivism. I suppose there could be a healthy collectivism for the purpose of holding an election, but can easily flip to a poisoned collective. We can get together and decide on certain things as a community. It's after the fact that we can decide differently, but community in name only.

I'm always reminded of an interview Ellsworth Kelly gave at the National Gallery of Art where he talked about being stopped by the police when he was photographing something and wasn't aware that he was trespassing. The cop said, "I don't see anything to photograph here". He was probably taking a photo of an interesting shape that inspired him. That's the pure individual view, not even community or collective. And why would an artist want either at that moment of inspiration? Now everyone runs to social media to share that type of thing, and throws it into the collective sphere.

Modern-day mystic Caroline Myss once said in one of her lectures that we all see the same room as we sit in it as a group of 100 individuals, but there are 100 different worldviews. Since no one wants to be alone in their views, we go right for the collective. A community doesn't automatically agree with you. #riff