Fri 18 Dec 2009
I don’t typically find myself listening to Bon Jovi, let alone watching his videos at the Burger King in the Munich train station. Nor does his new song remind me of Mozart, but I like the title to his new song “We weren’t born to follow”.
Face it, we all ask ourselves from time to time what road we’re on, trying to figure out where we’re going and deciding whether it’s worth going there. In our cars or airplanes we glance at the GPS — in life there’s no such gizmo to guide us. Sometimes we wing it, sometimes we take other people’s advice, and sometimes we listen to aging rock stars. I think Bon Jovi asks an interesting question though — are we happy following?
Certainly we must follow certain rules in society, and learning often starts by following in the footsteps of others. When we’re growing up our parents tell us what we can and cannot do, but often we’re unsettled by those rules and rebel by not following. Why do we feel that way, and why do we have such a strong urge to chart our own course?
An outside observer would be truly baffled by our world, everywhere you look there are signs telling us what we should and shouldn’t do, lines are painted on the road, keeping us in our lanes, and we build fences where we want others not to go. (Perhaps that’s why I like flying in the open sky so much.) Then when we talk to each other we can’t help telling others what to do. Sure we may have had experiences that taught us not to stick our hands in the fire, and sharing that wisdom is key to being human.
One of my favorite memories of my cousin was when he let his son play with the candles on the Christmas tree. He was over him like a hawk, but he let his son stick his finger in the flame, because that’s what the little boy wanted to do. The requisite “trösten” followed and made everything OK, but I admired my cousin for giving his son freedom to make mistakes.
So if following is good, if getting others to do what we think is right, if we constantly come up with ever cleverer ways to trick others into doing what we want… why don’t we like following? In fact, we don’t even honor followers, we look down on them. Think of who we look up to? The men and women who defy following, the ones who do things others think are crazy, those are the ones we build statues to, honor with holidays, emboss on our coins, or for whom we display their record-setting airplanes in our museums.
If following is bad, shouldn’t we teach that to our kids? Shouldn’t we encourage utter independence in our schools, governments and companies?
Of course anarchy doesn’t sound so great either. Cultures have different approaches to this kind of thing. Germany, where I am now, is a country that is even made fun of for following rules, but things like the unrestricted speed sections of the autobahn would be a catastrophe without rule-following.
In the U.S. on the other hand, we seem to be constantly breaking rules. Remember the last time you drove under the speed limit on a U.S. freeway… yeah, me neither.
Sadly, I doubt I have any great wisdom to impart here, but perhaps that’s good. Picasso once said: “a painting is never finished, it is only abandoned.”
I’ll cross-post to facebook for comments, in case you have anything to add. And I’ll leave you with the thoughts of another famous philosopher, Douglas Adams who wrote: “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”