Facebook has taken a lot of our attention in the past years. Immediacy and speed, access to a larger audience than our (relatively) slow-food for thought publication on the web or paper editions. The need to publish, to share our thoughts, to be heard, to exist through intellectual exposition and dialogue...A dose of narcissism seems inevitable in order to support our exposition issues.
Similarly in the arts we seek recognition from a larger audience; larger than the local trinity : me, myself and I. Unhealthy narcissism however creates an amount of dissonance in human societies. What is an unhealthy narcissism? I'd better let this question be answered from my psychologist friends. But if we transcend the local subjective phenomenon of narcissism or self-esteem and re-contextualize it as a creative force in human societies, we might consider it as a local accelerator of change.
Individualism, despite the fact of being a social flaw according to many scholars, might also offer opportunities for evolution; especially if it integrates the domain of art. Singularity seems to have a tendency to question authority; scientific, political, cultural...Singularity, supported by a certain dose of egocentrism, might create the necessary tension to redefine social values. Dialogue and debate among leading singularities are, I think, at the base of the democratic concept. Are all egocentric artists necessary for the evolution of our societies? I would answer with a question : Are all members of a society necessary for the evolution of the society in question?
Multireferentiality and complex thinking might be important allies for questions regarding human evolution in our spatiotemporal context...In other words...it's complicated. The need of simplicity - although functional and often necessary - drives me sometimes, as a citizen and an artist, in the trap of idealizations. My favorite idealization in the game between Singularity versus Universality is Holism :
Holism is a partial, one-dimensional, and simplifying vision of the whole. It reduces all other system-related ideas to the idea of totality, whereas it should be a question of confluence. Holism thus arises from the paradigm of simplification (or reduction of the complex to a master-concept or master-category).
EDGAR MORIN
(Source : https://manoftheword.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/morin-paradigm-of-complexity.pdf)
