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The Soft Censorship of Convention: Why Everyday Revolutions Grind to a Halt
The ‘Kind’ Obstacles Thwarting Minor Revolutions
When we think of revolution, we often envision grand scenes of people taking to the streets with flags. However, a true revolution begins with a trivial question in daily life: “Why must I take only this path?”, “Does this conventional choice actually make me happy?”, or “Can I categorize this phenomenon differently?”
When I attempted to mathematically model “people who look like Timothée Chalamet,” someone might have chided me, saying, “You can tell just by looking; why make it so complicated?” The suggestion to “not stand out” is, in fact, a temptation to “reduce the cost of thinking,” and simultaneously, a warning to “not disturb the existing system of sets.” Without realizing it, they are extinguishing the embers of revolution tossed by everyday experimentalists.
The Prison of Statistical Safety
The reason people pressure others to follow convention is that it is statistically “safe.” As we have previously discussed, because humans cannot handle absolute freedom, they feel a sense of relief within verified paths (conventions).
However, the reason the 17th-century elites abandoned their comfortable vested interests and chose persecution was that “individual truth” was more important than statistical safety. The modern pressure to “blend in” urges us to eliminate our own singularities and remain as ordinary data points. The moment I ignore my unique weights (w) and align myself with the societal average, my personal modeling stops, and the everyday revolution dies.
Why We Need Irrational Pioneers
We are under constant pressure to make economically rational choices—the cost-benefit analysis. The saying “Live like everyone else so you won’t suffer later” is profoundly economic. Yet, the progress of humanity has always been sparked by irrational individuals who stepped beyond the fences of that “rationality.”
From the system’s perspective, a person who rejects convention in their daily life and insists on their own method might look like an “error” or “noise.” However, in data science, critical insights are often discovered within that very noise. To conform to the command to “not stand out” is equivalent to manually deleting the most interesting variables from the model of our lives.
Conclusion: Choosing to Enjoy My Own ‘Persecution’
Now, whenever I hear the words “don’t stand out,” I think to myself: ‘Ah, I am currently creating a crack in someone’s rigid worldview.’ A revolution in daily life does not start with a grand slogan; it begins with the “unkindness” of questioning the “obviousness” dictated by convention.
I do not mind if I am marginalized or criticized as irrational in the process. Just as the 17th-century scientists did, I simply wish to redraw the world using my own equations. This exhausting task of redrawing the boundaries of sets and establishing my own model of happiness is the only way I can prove that I am alive.
If someone tells me once more to “just do what others do,” I will answer internally: “I have already discovered an element beyond the empty set that those ‘others’ could never see.”
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The Two Faces of Florence: Medici Splendor and Savonarola’s Flames
After the Peace of Lodi in 1454, Italy entered an era of unprecedented tranquility. Florence, in particular, was reborn as the cultural epicenter of Europe under the leadership of Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent). Yet, beneath this brilliant prosperity, a religious anxiety—the fear that they had forgotten the “Divine Order”—grew like a hidden cancer. Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar, fueled his movement with this very anxiety, injecting the element of “Judgment” into the opulent set of Florence.
Medici Vanity: The Pinnacle of Cultural Capital
The Medici family did not merely accumulate wealth; they utilized it to sponsor art and philosophy, attempting to transform Florence into a “Heaven on Earth.” However, from a strict Christian perspective, this was seen not as honoring the glory of God, but as manifesting human pride. The ornate artworks typical of the Renaissance, the indulgence in Ancient Greek philosophy, and the extravagant lifestyles of the aristocracy became perfect targets for Savonarola. To him, the Medici’s Florence was nothing more than an “unrepentant Babylon.”
Savonarola’s Sermons: The Politics of Deficiency and Fear
Savonarola accurately pierced through the relative deprivation and religious guilt felt by the populace. He argued that Florence’s wealth was evidence of its corruption and warned that Divine wrath was imminent.
When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, Savonarola proclaimed it as “the Divine Judgment that fulfills my prophecy,” triggering an explosion of popular support. In the vacuum left by the exiled Medici, he declared Florence a “Christian Republic.” He won the hearts of the masses through the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” where artworks, jewelry, cosmetics, and “pagan” books were fed to the flames.
The Collision of Two Axes: Humanism vs. Fundamentalism
This conflict was not a mere power struggle; it was a head-on collision between a “Human-centric worldview (Medici)” and a “God-centric worldview (Savonarola).”
- The Medici: Sought to realize the Imago Dei (Image of God) through human reason and artistic achievement.
- Savonarola: Sought to reach primordial salvation by burning away human physical desire and intellectual arrogance.
Savonarola redefined the sophisticated cultural capital built by the Medici as a “catalog of sins.” To a public weary of the lethargy that often accompanies abundance, his razor-sharp asceticism served as a powerful stimulant and a new identity.
Lessons Left by the Flames
Ultimately, Savonarola’s madness ended with his own execution by hanging and subsequent burning at the stake following a conflict with the Papacy. Yet, the traces he left were profound. Even masters like Michelangelo were deeply influenced by his sermons, projecting guilt and agony into their later works.
Splendor (Medici) and Dread (Savonarola) were two sides of the same Florentine coin. Paradoxically, the peace brought by the Treaty of Lodi drove humanity into internal conflict, allowing the “Prophet of Fire” to seize power in the cracks. This serves as a melancholic historical example of how, when abundance reaches its peak, humans aggressively attempt to fill their perceived “moral deficiency.”
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Textbook Truths and Factory-Model Schools: Why Education Ignores the Environment
The sentences in infant development textbooks are clear: without understanding the environment, one cannot understand the human being, nor can one develop their potential. This is a self-evident fact proven by psychology and neuroscience. However, the reality of public education we face directly contradicts this truth. Rather than considering the context and environment an individual is situated in, the system is preoccupied with confining them to an identical environment (the classroom) and churning out identical results (grades). Where does this discrepancy come from?
Violence in the Name of Efficiency
Public education is fundamentally a product of the Industrial Age. In a system designed to supply massive amounts of human resources cheaply and quickly, “consideration of individual environments” is dismissed as an excessively costly luxury. Analyzing the family environment, emotional background, and innate temperament of dozens of students in a single classroom to provide optimized education is seen as an “administrative inefficiency.” The system is optimized not for maximizing human potential, but for producing a “manageable workforce” that converges to a mean.
The Paradox of Equality: The Castration of Context
One of the pretexts used by public education to ignore environmental factors is, paradoxically, “equity.” It is the belief that giving everyone the same exam paper and the same textbook constitutes fairness. However, this is akin to forcing children standing at different starting lines to wear the exact same shoes for a race. Comparing only results while castrating environmental context is, in effect, a systemic exclusion of the potential of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. While the “maximum development” mentioned in textbooks is individual, the “evaluation” pursued by public education is collective.
The Inertia of Dealing Only with Controllable Variables
The school system lacks the capacity to control environmental variables outside its walls—such as family, community, and economic background. While textbooks state that these variables are crucial, educational administration marginalizes variables it cannot control. It is far more comfortable for administrators to focus only on variables that can be managed within the narrow confines of a classroom, such as progress, attendance, and testing. Ultimately, the attempt to understand a human being holistically disappears, leaving only the human being as an evaluative metric.
Restoring “True Education” Beyond Subjugation to the System
The reason public education does not move in the direction suggested by textbooks is that it functions more as a “sorting institution” than an educational one. From the moment the goal shifted from elevating human potential to assigning social hierarchy, the understanding of environmental context was pushed to the background.
However, as we have discussed previously, to live as an autonomous human being, one must personally recognize and supplement the “environmental factors” that the system ignores. If public education does not help maximize my potential, I must reclaim the sovereignty to educate myself by objectifying my own environment. The truths found in textbooks are, in a sense, a “courtesy toward humanity” that we must practice ourselves in our lives, even if schools fail to teach them.
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