Original? thought

This is a post from my original MySpace blog, that I thought was worth bringing over.

I was reading a post from k-os, an amazing musician, the other day about whether there are any original ideas out there anymore. He was mostly talking about frustrations around so-called pop culture, and how mixing what is "popular" and what is "underground" has come to represent originality. I can understand his frustrations. Many times when I read or watch something that is "popular" it pisses me off because it feels forced, devoid of any passion for being artistic, and is mostly a vehicle for marketing some useless product that attempts to replace the need for human interaction.

This brings me back though to a conversation I had with my friend Jeff a few years back that seemed to start along this path, and lead us to think about if there are or ever where any original ideas?

If you take a purely philosophical approach and think of thought as an evolutionary event, wherein no thought can occur without the previous one happening first, and each new thought is child of the previous, then you can trace all thought (and therefore originality) back to the first thought. So if you look at inventions as an example, each new product or invention is a derivation of it's predecessor; the light bulb is just a different was of lighting a candle.

If you go around in circles looking for originality when you think about it in that way, it can frustrate you because it challenges your notion of the people that inspired you and the idea that anyone can leave a lasting impact on society. And then it will probably depress you because you see a deterioration of the human desire to be be original and therefore praise originality. When I think about what the vast majority of people in our society hold up as artistic expression and drew inspiration from, it scares the shit out of me, it really does.

I've been saying for a while that the future of our society scares me because we seems to have relinquished control of our free will to sensationalist marketing. And the strong of us who are able to recognize this either do our best to fight the good battle, or have given up.

What do you all think?

p.s. I am well aware of the irony of using MySpace as my forum for these thoughts