Creating Meaning

Do we care more about performance than meaning? Do we want to maintain a privilege or are we seeking wisdom? It seems to me we have become more about performing for an audience than creating an original work. I understand Marjorie Taylor Greene has authored no legislation while raking in the bucks for the noise she makes. Seeking wisdom tears down the walls of privileged opinions. Compare Socrates and Elon Musk.

Those thoughts came from reading the review of Tyson Yunkaporta’s book bristles with revelation.

Right Story, Wrong Story is above all a critique of how we create meaning, which it divides between right stories or wrong stories. Today we live in a miasma of wrong stories: PR, fake news and advertising. These generate knowledge but are compromised by self-serving motives. As such, a reckoning for wrong stories is always just around the corner. Right stories are more akin to wisdom. They are time-honoured and collaboratively formed through the process of yarning, while employing multiple perspectives that squeeze out personal biases.

In a book that bristles with revelation, the most shining aha moments arrive when Indigenous and Western thinking align. Yarning, for example, parallels the scientific method, while systems-thinking appreciates things within their natural context.

Even right stories have a precarious existence as predatory wrong stories skulk in the scrub. Consider how climate-denying pseudoscience imitates the trappings of science. The author also worries that Indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and exploited by puffed-up tech bros desperate for an edge in the knowledge economy. “You can’t just draw dots on a Fitbit and call it a digital walkabout,” he says.

Am I the only one who finds "digital walkabout" an obnoxious concept?

There must be a limit to this churning of ideas past which we can find creative thinking and creative acts.

sch 2/5