There are bubbles and there are bubbles.
I'm not going to talk about financial bubbles here. I'm going to talk of bubbles of the mind. We live in a society which is highly fragmented by points of view, and small, emergent and ever-evolving subcultures. The street and skate culture has declined a little, and the cos-play and anime culture have risen abit more in Singapore. People are in circles of income and class, where who they meet is determined by where they, stay, the schools we go to. Thankfully in Singapore, schooling is determined by educational ablity, so the poor can go to top schools, but the rich who spend time reading books, attending piano classes and have parents who taught them to read and write end up in the top schools. There are great levelers, like the national library, the internet and funds to subsidize computers, but nothing beats parents who can guide their kids (for better or worse) to a good education.
There are bubbles, and there is the capacity of the mind. As a child, many many things escape you. Developmental psychologist tell us that children begin to see opposing points of view at about the age of ten, but only begin to see the world in shades of grey from 12-13 onwards. It is at that stage when the world becomes shades of grey, that they are bombarded with learning as their brains become capable of taking in more knowledge (thus the workload of the current secondary schools), and they are given youth and sub-cultures to choose from, in order to escape the orthodoxy of whatever their parents defined as their childhood and home environment.
There is a bubble of school, most in Singapore a privileged enough not to work through secondary school, to focus on learning and the trials of friends, educational, sporting and artistic challenges. That is a time of learning and experimentation. Yet that is also a bubble, but a bubble that the mind can bear. A happier time where things are simpler, mainly because folks in that stage can only see things more simply, and the betrayals and disappointments which we think characterize adulthood are just beginning. That is also a most painful time, as the human has not grown its emotional skin to ward off pains and unhappiness which the teenager sees (hopefully) for the first time. I think that the experiences in this bubble are fundamental, formative and potentially traumatizing, many experiences before the age of sixteen essentially define who we are, our tastes, confidence and preferences.
Let me talk about these bubbles in different terms. Re-defining what i have just covered.
There are bubbles of perception.
There are bubbles of institutions (e.g school) and the communities surrounding the institution.
Simply put we can only perceive that which our senses can take in and of that, notice what our minds are capable of noticing and think thoughts which our brains are capable of handling. Many psychological effects happen here, priming and trained pattern recognition is an important one. We understand patterns and concepts which we have learnt, and can see them when they next appear. (Life cycle of a frog, life cycle of a human, life cycle of a product, life cycle of a relationship) we apply using metaphors.
There are bubbles of institutions. I talk about institutions in the sense of the architecture (building), the policies (rules) and the people (community, and circles of friends).
A school has its own building. If a school is built on a hill, the students will understand and see the lay of the land around the school. If a school is built in the middle of apartment blocks, a student may only know the landmarks he or she walks to. If a school has no central meeting place, but only classrooms and corridors, students who attend the same school may never meet each other, only walking to and from class each day.
The policies shape the school. I attended a hokkien clan association primary school, we bowed low when we greeted a teacher, even along the corridor, till today, i bow somewhat when greeting authority, even if it just manifests as a slumping of shoulders and head. How long the recess break is shapes how friendships form.
The people who make the community, key people like principals, teachers, stand-out students, and quiet wall-flowers make a community. The group of friends one gravitates to the cliques formed in each class make what an individual knows.
The fact of the matter is, we can only know the institutions we are in intimately. The boys' school down the valley will never understand what it is like to be in the girls' school at the top of the hill. Even learning vicariously through stories, gives insight into that institution, but not deep insight.
Thus, i would say that the institutions which we are part of form part of the bubbles we are in.
So:
bubbles = sum of: ( perception + institutions) over time
Our perceptions, our institutions (or lack therof) will change over time.
Why did i start writing this post?
I have two more thoughts.
1) The act of starting and running a company requires one to leave all the bubbles behind.
The point of new business entities is to re-make the way institutions currently operate. they are change makers. Change has a starting point, but no end point of reference. By definition, it alters the perception and institutions (companies, schools, governments) which it works with. And over time, enough change constitutes radical alteration of institutions.
(perception is far harder to change as that is biological change, that depends on biological evolution, which moves in generations, while social evolution moves far faster, in decades or less on the internet)
2) Another bubble exists.
This is a far more abstract point.
We have a line between the real and not real.
If one looks at the idea of 'ghosts' and 'demons' and their portrayal in art as a reflection of the dreams and subconcious of the human being, there is a strong inclination to pervert that which we see in our everyday life. 'disappearances', 'the grotesque'.
A western, judeo-christian view of the world splits quite neatly between the 'real' and the 'sublime'. All nice views of conventionality or beauty. But does not take into consideration the space where nothing really exists except for fragments, and the entities which arise in that space, like the space between dreaming and waking we cannot describe in words.
Japanese art and anime have space for that world between dreaming and waking, and live in a far more complex space.
I'd like to point out, that it is probably possible to completely exclude a particular view of the world. To remove it from perceptions and institutions and in so doing, form a bubble in and of itself, excluding everything else. The lack of mention of the grotesque within judeo-christian culture, except as the taboo of hell, is a bubble in and of itself. Singaporean culture, with its pragmatic ways, seem to have a dollar sign over everything, and leave out intrinsic value, like the worth of the human, the worth of art.
I don't understand how these bubbles of collective reality form yet.
I think business can break bubbles of collective reality which form profitable opportunities, however there are many, deeper bubbles of collective reality which have formed in our modern, daily life which we are not aware of.
- dirtiness v.s sanitation
- ugliness v.s consumer and popular culture
There may be bubbles of collective reality which have characterized humans, like we expect objects to fall when dropped (gravity), cups to hold water (mass and density) and for sound to carry through air.
Bubbles characterize our growth as human beings, from childhood to adulthood, they characterize modern society and its institutions and business led change. I propose that bubbles under-gird all cultures and civilizations and the human race itself.
