Jason Doll explains the power of art in culture

What if I were to tell you that we all lived within a projection of the mind. A series of information gathered from your senses and put together in your mind and then projected to your body as the world? Crazy, right? Maybe, but maybe not. Your eyes alone are useless without your body or your mind, you use them to take in the information such as spectrums of lighting and reflections when you look across the world. This is great and all, but your mind is the true wonderment of the body, being able to take in this vast amount of information and organizing it in such a way that allows you to orientate yourself within the world. This projection of the world is the stage upon which you live.

Let me explain a little further, when you get into a car your eyes focus on the handle and where it may be, the signal that is sent to your mind arranges the lighting, the depths, the colors and everything your body needs to be able to physically reach out and grab the handle. Your mind is doing things you are unaware of, it’s not like you have to think hard about opening the door, your mind allows your body to accommodate for what you perceive yourself doing in the immediate future based upon your perceptions of the present. Your hand begins to open as your arm swings toward the door, all this while you are walking towards your car itself, rolling heel to toe, bending at the knee to form each step. Your other hand may be reaching for the keys in your jacket pocket and all of this is going on while your eyes are already looking for the next opportunity of engagement. It seems extremely simple to us, but think of how far robotics have come and there has yet to be a form of artificial intelligence that can orientate itself within the world of walking fluidly through the busy streets of New York akin to that of the average human being.

So let’s break this down further, I’m sure before you even looked at the car a thought ran through your head that told you, “it’s time to go” or “I have somewhere to be” that single thought, as small and fleeting as it may be set this whole chain of events into action that told your mind to start taking in information so that you can carry out your ideal in the physical reality. What if it’s more complicated than grabbing the handle of a car door? What if its attempting to explain an idea to another person in such a way that it has the potential to change the way that person may or may not perceive the world in which they live? What if it’s explaining an emotional experience that may have occurred to you in your past that caused a piece of you to either be lost or found and then taking those concepts and formulating them so that others may partake in your being.

Words are a tool, you see a series of letters placed in an order that forms a word, these words are then formulated within a sentence to create a statement, but then these sentences can be organized in such a profound way that they can become powerful enough to convey an idea. What happens when words are simply not enough? It’s not the word, the sentence, or even the book that has meaning, its how it is perceived within your mind and how it effects the being of your soul that brings meaning to each individual letter or word. These symbols are tools we use to convey to one another a part of ourselves, even the spoken word holds this power. So what happens when words aren’t enough, or they simply can’t get the point across?

Before I came to the Freedom First Network, I worked in the Civil Engineering workforce. There are normally two major things that go into a project before it is built. The Spec Book and the drawings. The drawings are like a Lefty or a Liberal, they take an idea and draw it out on paper, as to how something should look when completed, it takes the idea of what the neighborhood water and sewer mains should look like, and puts them down on paper in drawings, you can’t really write how something should look, you can’t really use words to describe an entire water or sewer layout of a town. It would be vague and left up to the interpretation of the readers, so instead they are drawn in pictures to articulate the vision from the mind and project them within reality. Now, think of the Spec book as the “Conservative”. It is a series of words placed in order that tells the contractor what materials may or may not be used, the soil levels, how deep something must be buried, what the load ratings must be on the roads to accommodate traffic. It takes these ideals and these drawings and forces them to orientate themselves within the world of reality so that they may carry out their necessary function in the world and actually become useful to the masses. We will get to the point of conservatism and liberalism a bit later.

In reality, a house or a sewer system is far less complicated than that of human emotion, and we as human beings are very social creatures. If you sit and really listen to people, even complete strangers they will tell you things about themselves that are just weird and obscure. But that’s who we are, and it’s really a beautiful thing how we strive for the interactions with others around us to bring meaning and perspective within our own lives. This is where I believe art comes in. Art is an expression of the soul, it’s a way to take an idea or a belief, even a memory and portray it in such a way that allows it to speak to others in an attempt to reach into their consciousness. As for myself, I am absolutely covered in tattoos, they tell a story. Everything from the struggles I endured within my years of college to powerful Biblical prophecies yet to come. When people ask about them, it’s a chance for me to share a part of myself with someone else, and in turn a chance for them to share a piece of them with me. Through these shared pieces of art we are able to share a part of one another and see each other as more than just another meat suit, instead you see the struggles, the victories, the losses and it reminds you that everyone is living a life just as complicated as your own.

When you see a painting you are seeing the heart of the artist, something that’s inside him/her that they deemed necessary to share with you. Some stranger, decided to take a piece of himself/herself and put it on display for other random strangers to look upon and judge. Why in the world would you do something like that? Again, I think it’s the connection between people that drives us to relate to one another. An example I will use is that many of the paintings we see are of the vast armies of demons and devils in darkness entangled in a war of angelic beings tearing each other apart. What does it mean, could the artist be conveying the idea of good versus evil within the world itself? Maybe the artist struggles within his/her own soul over preforming good or doing evil, and the only way he can convey those thoughts or those emotions is through the stroke of a brush and some paint. It becomes possible for others to look at this drawing or painting and relate it to their own life, to struggle to remain good even though the claws of darkness scrape for control over your consciousness. There is power in art, and it’s absolutely ignorant to simply brush that aside.

Now it’s true that most artists and people within this creative realm tend to be more liberal in their ideologies. Their minds are set more to create something new within culture. We need these people, I’m not talking about the screaming blue haired second cousin that has no thoughts of her own. I’m talking about the deep thinking artists that are involves with portraying the world in a new light, or the artists that are able to portray emotion through dance, songs, and paintings. It’s the creative that push us to new places, new designs, new technologies, even new ways of thinking, it can be absolutely incredible or it can be an absolute tragedy. Now we as conservatives are like the “spec book” rigid and stationed within reality, it is by the sweat of our brow and the blood of our hands that we are able to make these ideas a reality. We can take the beautiful drawings of a building and fashion the bricks to make it a physical, practical, and beautiful. We orientate ourselves within the reality of the world, and we often times tell the creative types whether or not an idea can be carried out within the physical realities of our given world. This is why I really try to hold true to Jordan Petersons Rule, “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”

The truth is we need each other, and the sooner we realize that the better. We conservatives need to be pushed to create new things and get out of our habits of old to enrich the lives of humanity, where the Liberals need to realize that sometimes their ideas are absolutely trash and don’t work within the limitations of reality. We need to get back to talking and exchanging ideas with one another honestly, so we can make this country a better place. I really believe that one of the necessary steps to making that happen will stem through not only art but our perceptions of one another, our being and how we are able to orientate that within our own reality.

-The Shoe.

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