On the Shoulders of Giants
Are you a good scholar?
Nothing these days is new. We are all, as they say, standing on the shoulders of giants.
Everything has already been said, done, and thought of. Maybe not everything has been felt - and I’d be willing to argue that our capacity for sensation and feeling is ever-expanding as consciousness transcends. But on this earthly plane, there is nothing new.
Even the latest “discoveries”, which pop in the headlines, have been known by our ancient ancestors. Whether you deduced it from your laboratory microscope, or observed it in a study, or your great great great great great great grand ancestor just knew it in her bones - that does not matter to me. Maybe we only conceive of and conceptualize it now, but it has always existed, whatever it is. Nothing is new.
So the concept of ownership, when it comes to ideas, or words, or styles, is silly. Is childish. Is human folly. And yet I myself have been personally and professionally subject to plagiarism and the “stealing” of intellectual property. How do we synchronize these two seemingly conflicting ideas, of property and no property? How do we live with both, ego and collective consciousness?
Ben answered this so succinctly for me the other day: scholarship. To be a good scholar is to credit one’s resources. This is what has been forgotten by the millennial generation, where 60% are entrepreneurs. Giving citations makes you more credible, not less. Somehow we have forgotten to respect our wise elders. We think that in order to gain credibility we must be the original creator of all of our ideas. We hesitate to name our guides, lest our followers (ie customers) look to them instead of us. Lest we out ourselves as the imposters that we think we are.
Giving citations makes you more credible, not less
To give credit is a sign of intelligence. To give credit means that you have done your research. To give credit means that you can be trusted. To claim all ideas or creative offerings to be entirely your own either means you cannot be trusted because you are not honest, or you cannot be trusted because you have not looked around at the world and gleaned information from others.
The yogic masters always taught the yoga named after their own gurus. The best books are those with a long list of citations propping up their foundation, strong.
What about the argument that you aren’t completely “aligned” with the individuals you’ve learned from, and so you sweep their name under a rug lest you be “associated” with them? Well, I ask you, do you go through the book’s citations to make sure that the author’s political views align with all of those scholars he credits? Since when is it required that to learn from someone, we must agree with their every view entirely? This is, as I’ve written before, a symptom of a society with socially-acceptable Borderline Personality Disorder. It either is this, or it is that. Except it’s not. Both can be true.
And so, to live in an era of media where ‘intellectual property’ is like a palmful of sand grains we are struggling to cup, let us be good scholars. Let us put forth our ideas, none of them new, but all of them unique to us, and so precious in their own way, with reverence and credit to those who influence us. Let us give credits with quotation marks, when need be, to the perfect words that fell from someone else’s mouths to our own ears. And let us not let the fear of theft keep us from creating.