Sammy Younan
Girth Radio Presents…
“Why must we be so serious about what divide us and trivialize what bring us together?”
The speaker Alexandre O. Philippe is on to something with his question. In 1986 William Captain Kirk Shatner went on SNL to tell the classic looking nerds: “Get A Life!” It’s funny cos it’s true. This is how we’ve always treated nerds…you could easily mine Simpsons for a variety of these jokes.
From his TED bio: “Alexandre O. Philippe is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker dedicated to the appreciation and preservation of our global pop culture…his feature-length documentaries include The People vs. George Lucas, The Life and Times of Paul the Psychic Octopus and Doc of the Dead.”
Spend a couple of minutes on social media and a) sadly that’s a couple of minutes you’ll never get back and b) you’ll quickly pick up the various Berlin Walls and Checkpoint Charlies you must traverse. It’s high school all over again with sky is falling maturity: tribes provide safety and they provide identity and they successfully mine outrage. Political correctness is a by-product of Western comfort; it’s a cheat code so people don’t have to think. Change is great as long as people don’t have to get off their couch and actually do something…hashtags are solid for that. Protest the issue, fit in with others and still see the latest Fast and Furious movie. S’not how change actually works.
The underlying theme of Alexandre’s TED Talk is imagination. Imagination is the key; imagination is more important than diversity; it can overcome clichés, it’s inspiring and it has a ripple effect. A heritage of imagination…we saw that with Stan Lee and his collaborators in creating Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and all the classic Marvel superheroes. Imagination is the ability to see…to witness and hopefully document an original story.
We tell ourselves stories all the time…about who we are, what we’ve done, what we can become, what we tell others, how others see us…stories about our tribe. And it’s weird because some of them are not good stories.
All this imagination and that’s the story you want to tell?!
